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 Burger while at UMASS.

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:

• Reliability: Using virtualization for cheaper fault tolerant data centers
• Performance: Automatically balancing load using virtual machine migration
• Server and Energy Costs: Consolidating servers by exploiting sharable memory between virtual machines
• Performance Modeling: Predicting the performance of complex, multi-tier data center applications
• Capacity Planning: Modeling the overheads incurred by the virtualization layer for different types of applications

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

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

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.

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 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.

I have worked on the following publications while at UMASS.

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

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.
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.

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.

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.

Here are some of the posters and talks I've given since joining UMass.

Profiling and Modeling Resource Utilization of Virtualized Applications
Timothy Wood, Ludmila Cherkasova, Kivanc Ozonat, and Prashant Shenoy.
Middleware, Belgium, December 2008, Presentation.
Xen Summit, Boston, June 2008, Presentation.

Exploiting Sharing for Server Consolidation
Timothy Wood, Gabriel Tarasuk-Levin, James Cipar, Peter Desnoyers, Prashant Shenoy, Mark Corner, Emery Berger. VMworld 2007, San Francisco, Sept 2007. Poster

Black-box and Gray-box Strategies for Virtual Machine Migration
The slides from my NSDI 2007 talk are available here.

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

I recently started blogging about grad school and anything related to virtualization in data centers.