I have graduated and moved to The George Washington University!

Find my new site here: http://faculty.cs.gwu.edu/~timwood

I joined the Laboratory for Advanced Systems Software in the Fall of 2005 to work with my advisor, Prashant Shenoy. I have also collaborated with Arun Venkataramani, David Jensen, Mark Corner, and Emery Berger from UMass; Lucy Cherkasova from HP Labs; and KK Ramakrishnan, Kobus van der Merwe, and Andres Lagar-Cavilla from AT&T Research.

I am working on the VirtX (Virtualization Technologies) project, and am particularly interested in how new virtualization technologies like Xen and VMware can allow for better performance, reliability, and security in modern data centers. My work thus far has covered topics such as:

• Cloud Computing: Pooling resources from multiple data centers and connecting them back to users
• Reliability: Using virtualization for cheaper fault tolerance and disaster recovery
• Performance: Automatically balancing load using virtual machine migration
• Server and Energy Costs: Consolidating servers by exploiting sharable memory between virtual machines
• Capacity Planning: Modeling the overheads incurred by the virtualization layer for different applications

Recent Events:

8/1/2011: I have started my new position as an assistant professor at The George Washington University! See my new site here.

5/27/2011: I have defended my thesis and finished the requirements for my PhD. I will begin my new job as an assistant professor at George Washington University this fall!

1/8/2011: My paper on using virtualization to reduce the cost of Byzantine Fault Tolerance has been accepted into EuroSys 2011.

12/20/2010: My paper on WAN migration of virtual machines was accepted into VEE 2011.

I am expecting to graduate in Summer 2011, and am considering both industry and academic jobs. If you are interested in my work, please see my C.V. and other application materials to the right.

In Summer 2010 I will be continuing my research on cloud computing as an intern at AT&T Research.

In July 2009 I presented my thesis proposal. The members of my committee are: Prashant Shenoy, Mark Corner, Jim Kurose, Arun Venkataramani, and Mani Krishna.

In March 2009 my Memory Buddies paper on colocating VMs to maximize page sharing was one of the top four VEE papers, and was automatically accepted into a special issue of Operating Systems Review on virtualization.

In Fall of 2008 I worked on cloud computing and VPNs during an internship at AT&T Research with Kobus van der Merwe and K.K. Ramakrishnan.

In May 2008 I passed my PhD Candidacy Exam with distinction. I was one of only seventeen students to receive the "with distinction" award since 1995.

I spent the summer of 2007 at HP Labs, interning with Lucy Cherkasova on models of virtualized applications.

I help maintain the UMass Trace Repository which collects application and resource traces and releases them for use by researchers worldwide.

I designed the curriculum and have taught CS 197U: Introduction to Unix and Linux since it was first offered (Fall 2009, Spring 2010, and Fall 2010). More details are available at the course web page.

I have also been actively involved with my department's undergraduate research program and have acted as a mentor for four undergraduate students performing research in my lab.

I currently have several papers under submission or recently accepted. Since I am currently applying for jobs, I am posting preliminary versions of these papers here.

Modellus: Automated Modeling of Complex Data Center Applications
Peter Desnoyers, Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy, Sangameshwar Patil, Harrick Vin. Under Submission 2010.

I have published the following papers while at UMass.

BenchLab: An Open Testbed for Realistic Benchmarking of Web Applications
Emmanuel Cecchet, Veena Udayabhanu, Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy. To appear in the 2nd USENIX Conference on Web Application Development (WebApps '11).

ZZ and the Art of Practical BFT Execution
Timothy Wood, Rahul Singh, Arun Venkataramani, Prashant Shenoy, and Emmanuel Cecchet. To appear in EuroSys 2011. (Extended Technical Report - Presentation Slides)

CloudNet: Dynamic Pooling of Cloud Resources by Live WAN Migration of Virtual Machines
Timothy Wood, K.K. Ramakrishnan, Jacobus van der Merwe, and Prashant Shenoy. To appear in International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE), 2011.

Disaster Recovery as a Cloud Service: Economic Benefits & Deployment Challenges
Timothy Wood, Emmanuel Cecchet, K.K. Ramakrishnan, Prashant Shenoy, Jacobus van der Merwe, and Arun Venkataramani. To appear in the 2nd Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, HotCloud 2010.

The Case for Enterprise-ready Virtual Private Clouds
Timothy Wood, Alexandre Gerber, K.K. Ramakrishnan, Jacobus van der Merwe, and Prashant Shenoy. In proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, HotCloud 2009. Presentation Slides

Sandpiper: Black-box and Gray-box Resource Management for Virtual Machines
Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy, Arun Venkataramani, and Mazin Yousif. To appear in Computer Networks Journal Special Issue on Virtualized Data Centers 2009. (Extended version of NSDI 07 paper)

Memory Buddies: Exploiting Page Sharing for Smart Colocation in Virtualized Data Centers
Timothy Wood, Gabriel Tarasuk-Levin, Prashant Shenoy, Peter Desnoyers, Emmanuel Cecchet, and Mark Corner. In proceedings of the International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, VEE 2009. (Selected as one of the top four papers, also to appear in OS Review, June 2009) Trace Data, Presentation Slides

Profiling and Modeling Resource Usage of Virtualized Applications
Timothy Wood, Ludmila Cherkasova, Kivanc Ozonat, and Prashant Shenoy. In proceedings of ACM International Conference on Middleware 2008. Presentation Slides

Black-box and Gray-box Strategies for Virtual Machine Migration
Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy, Arun Venkataramani, and Mazin Yousif. Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Cambridge, MA, April 2007. Presentation Slides

Efficient Data Migration in Self-managing Storage Systems
Vijay Sundaram, Tim Wood, and Prashant Shenoy. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomic Computing, Dublin, Ireland, June 2006.

As an undergraduate at Rutgers University in the ECE Department I worked at WINLAB and had the following publications with my advisor, Dr. Yanyong Zhang.

Channel Surfing and Spatial Retreats: Defenses against Wireless Denial of Service
W. Xu, T. Wood, W. Trappe, Y. Zhang. ACM Workshop on Wireless Security, MobiCom, Philadelphia, PA, Fall 2004 .

The Feasibility of Launching and Detecting Jamming Attacks in Wireless Networks
W. Xu, W. Trappe, Y. Zhang, T. Wood. ACM MobiHoc, Urbana-Champaign, IL, May 2005.

In my infrequent spare time, I like to get outdoors or do something creative.

I've been repeatedly elected "Message Meister" by the grad students in my department, meaning that I have the dubious honor of spamming the department's broadcast list every week about free food events. I've created an archive of these (hopefully humorous) emails here. Warning: These may be full of obscure historical references and bad puns (but at least they include citations).

I once started blogging about grad school and anything related to virtualization in data centers, but like most bloggers, I don't update more than once per blue moon.