Timothy Wood - home

I am a computer science faculty member at The George Washington University. I teach and do research in the general areas of operating systems and distributed systems. I am particularly interested in how new virtualization technologies can provide application agnostic tools that improve performance, efficiency, and reliability in cloud computing data centers.

Prior to joining GW I was a Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst working with Prashant Shenoy. Before that I was an ECE undergraduate at Rutgers University and did research with Yanyong Zhang in the WINLAB.

I primarily work in the fields of operating systems and networking; my recent work has focused on topics such as:

• Cloud Computing: Pooling resources from multiple data centers and connecting them back to users
• Virtualization: Using and modifying the virtualization layer to build application agnostic tools that improve performance and reliability of data center applications
• Automation: Building intelligent systems that dynamically manage large server clusters with minimal need for human administrators
• Modeling: Designing statistical modeling techniques that characterize application or system behavior to guide decision making processes

If you are currently a student at GW or are applying to the Ph.D. program, contact me if you are interested in working on distributed systems or cloud computing problems.

If you are an undergraduate at GW check this list of research project ideas and let me know if you are interested in working on one.

Here is a short bio.

• 4/12/2012: My student, Jinho Hwang, has had our paper on CPU scheduling for virtual desktops accepted at IWQoS 2012! Jinho has also been accepted for an internship at IBM TJ Watson this summer. Way to go, Jinho!
• 4/4/2012: Congrats to Tian Gu and Upendra Sharma (Seagull: Intelligent Cloud Bursting for Enterprise Applications) and to Sean Barker (An Empirical Study of Memory Sharing in Virtual Machines) the UMass students I worked with for two papers recently accepted to the USENIX Annual Technical Conference!
• 3/20/2012: We have released an extended technical report on CloudNet, our system for efficient WAN migration of VMs.
• 12/16/2011: According to Google Scholar, my work just passed 1,000 citations. Hopefully they were mostly saying good things!
• 10/28/2011: I will be presenting my work on using cloud platforms to provide high performance disaster recovery services at SOCC 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal.
• 10/24/2011: My PhD dissertation has been selected for an Outstanding Dissertation Award by the UMass Computer Science department (sponsored by Yahoo). It will also be nominated for the ACM's Doctoral Dissertation Award.

In Spring 2012 I will be teaching Special Topics in Data Centers and Cloud Computing. This will be open to both advanced undergraduate students (who have taken the Operating Systems course) and PhD students.

In Fall 2011 I taught CS-2113: Software Engineering I (formerly CS-143).

Previously I taught an introductory Linux course which may have useful material for students new to Linux and Unix.

Conference and Workshop Papers

• An Empirical Study of Memory Sharing in Virtual Machines, Sean Barker, Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy, Ramesh Sitaraman, Proceedings of the Usenix Annual Technical Conference, June 2012. paper (short + long 18% acceptance)

• Seagull: Intelligent Cloud Bursting for Enterprise Applications, Tian Guo, Upendra Sharma, Timothy Wood, Sambit Sahu, Prashant Shenoy, Proceedings of the Usenix Annual Technical Conference (short paper), June 2012. paper (short + long 18% acceptance)

• Adaptive Dynamic Priority Scheduling for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures, Jinho Hwang, Timothy Wood, Proceedings of the IEEE / ACM International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS), June 2012. paper (22% acceptance)

• PipeCloud: Using Causality to Overcome Speed-of-Light Delays in Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery, Timothy Wood, Andres Lagar-Cavilla, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Prashant Shenoy, Jacobus Van der Merwe, Proceedings of 2nd Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), October 2011. paper (17% acceptance)

• BenchLab: An Open Testbed for Realistic Benchmarking of Web Applications, Emmanuel Cecchet, Veena Udayabhanu, Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy, Proceedings of 2nd USENIX Conference on Web Application Development (WebApps), June 2011. paper

• ZZ and the Art of Practical BFT Execution, Timothy Wood, Rahul Singh, Arun Venkataramani, Prashant Shenoy, Emmanuel Cecchet, Proceedings of Eurosys, April 2011. paper (15% acceptance)

• CloudNet : Dynamic Pooling of Cloud Resources by Live WAN Migration of Virtual Machines, Timothy Wood, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Prashant Shenoy, Jacobus Van der Merwe, Proceedings of the International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE), March 2011. paper (29% acceptance)

• Disaster Recovery as a Cloud Service: Economic Benefits and Deployment Challenges, Timothy Wood, Emmanuel Cecchet, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Prashant Shenoy, Jacobus Van der Merwe, Proceedings of the Conference on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud), June 2010. paper (24% acceptance)

• The Case for Enterprise-Ready Virtual Private Clouds, Timothy Wood, Alexandre Gerber, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Prashant Shenoy, Jacobus Van der Merwe, Proceedings of the Conference on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud), June 2009. paper (32% acceptance)

• Memory buddies: Exploiting Page Sharing for Smart Colocation in Virtualized Data Centers, Timothy Wood, Gabriel Tarasuk-Levin, Prashant Shenoy, Peter Desnoyers, Emmanuel Cecchet, Mark D. Corner, Proceedings of the International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE), March 2009. paper (35% acceptance)

• Profiling and Modeling Resource Usage of Virtualized Applications, Timothy Wood, Ludmila Cherkasova, Kivanc Ozonat, Prashant Shenoy, Middleware Conference, December 2008. paper (17% acceptance)

• Black-Box and Gray-Box Strategies for Virtual Machine Migration, Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy, Arun Venkataramani, Mazin Yousif, USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), April 2007. paper (24% acceptance)

• Efficient Data Migration in Self-managing Storage Systems, Prashant Shenoy, Timothy Wood, Vijay Sundaram, International Conference on Autonomic Computing, June 2006. paper

• The Feasibility of Launching and Detecting Jamming Attacks in Wireless Networks, Wenyuan Xu, Wade Trappe, Yanyong Zhang, Timothy Wood, International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc), May 2005. (14% acceptance)

• Channel Surfing and Spatial Retreats: Defenses Against Wireless Denial Of Service, Wenyuan Xu, Timothy Wood, Wade Trappe, Yanyong Zhang, Workshop on Wireless Security, September 2004.

Journal Articles

• Enterprise-Ready Virtual Cloud Pools: Vision, Opportunities, and Challenges, Timothy Wood, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Prashant Shenoy, Jacobus Van der Merwe, Oxford Computer Journal (to appear), 2012. paper

• Sandpiper: Black-Box and Gray-Box Resource Management For Virtual Machines, Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy, Arun Venkataramani, Mazin Yousif, Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking, December 2009. paper

• Memory Buddies: Exploiting Page Sharing for Smart Colocation in Virtualized Data Centers, Timothy Wood, Gabriel Tarasuk-Levin, Prashant Shenoy, Peter Desnoyers, Emmanuel Cecchet, Mark D. Corner, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 2009. paper

• Agile Dynamic Provisioning of Multi-tier Internet Applications, Bhuvan Urgaonkar, Prashant Shenoy, Abhishek Chandra, Pawan Goyal, Timothy Wood, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS), 2008. paper

Thesis:

• Improving Data Center Resource Management, Deployment, and Availability with Virtualization, Timothy Wood, Ph.D Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst, May 2011. paper - slides

Patents

• Detecting an error in a prediction of resource usage of an application in a virtual environment - US Patent #7,818,145
• Patent applications submitted while at HP Labs
• Patent application submitted while at AT&T Research

View bibtex entries

You can also see my publication list and related citations on my Google Scholar page.

I have been a member of the program committee for the following conferences:

• Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD 2012)
• EuroSys 2012 - Shadow PC
• IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC) 2010, 2011, 2012 - PC
• International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing (CGC) 2011, 2012 - PC

I have acted as an external reviewer for a number of conferences including:

• NSDI, HotCloud, SenSys, Usenix, and EuroSys

Perhaps these will be useful for others as well…

• Using a Mac for (Computer) Science
• Hints and scripts for running experiments
• Using LaTeX
• SSH Tips