Associate Professor
Joined School 1998
BSc (Saskatchewan),
MMath (Waterloo),
PhD (Toronto)
| brecht@uwaterloo.ca | |
| Web | http://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~brecht |
| Voice | 519-888-4567 x35892 |
| Fax | 519-885-1208 |
|
| Timothy Brecht
Associate Professor Joined School 1998 BSc (Saskatchewan),
|
Professor Brecht's main research interest currently relates to understanding and improving the performance of computer systems. This has lead to research projects spanning a variety of topics including high-performance Internet systems and services; operating systems; parallel and distributed computing; memory allocation and garbage collection; and networking.
Much of Professor Brecht's current research is devoted to exploring new and improved methods for permitting efficient and scalable interaction between applications, libraries, run-time systems, and the operating system in multi-core and multiprocessor systems. One problem with existing systems is that many frequently used operating system calls are complex, expensive and ill-suited to the needs of current applications. These problems often stem from the fact that many system calls in use today were designed more than twenty years ago and didn't consider multiprocessor environment. Additionally they are now being used in ways and for purposes never imagined by the original designers. As a consequence, many important applications do not scale well. This research involves first better understanding the needs of these applications, and then using this knowledge to improve their use of underlying system software and improving that software. This includes system libraries, run-time systems, and operating system interfaces, mechanisms and implementations. The goal is to extend the functionality and significantly improve the performance of many important modern applications, and to provide new generalized mechanisms to support advanced and highly efficient application development.
P.G. Sorenson Distinguished Graduate Lecture, University of Saskatchewan (2001); Nominee: 3M Outstanding Canadian Instructor (1998)
From 1988 to 1993 (while working on his PhD) Professor Brecht consulted with the Toronto Stock Exchange's Advanced Workstation Division. During that time he was responsible for the configuration and administration of several UNIX workstations and provided UNIX education. He was responsible for first connecting the Toronto Stock Exchange to the Internet (using UUCP) which provided them with their first email and Internet news access.
From 1996 to 2000 he was a visiting scientist at IBM's Centre for Advanced Studies where he worked on a project concerned with high-performance parallel computing and another concerned with improving the performance of the HPJ (High-Performance Java) system's garbage collector.
In 2000 Professor Brecht spent a year at Hewlett-Packard's research lab in Palo Alto. In 2001 he returned to Waterloo but took a leave of absence in order to spend 2001 and 2002 continuing to work with Hewlett Packard. This work has concentrated on better understanding high-performance Internet server design and implementation and the interplay between such applications, the operating system, and the network.
In addition to the above work, he has also consulted for Sun Microsystems, IBM, Alias|Wavefront, and has served as an expert witness.
S. Tozer, T. Brecht and A. Aboulnaga, Q-Cop: Avoiding Bad Query Mixes to Minimize Client Timeouts Under Heavy Loads, 26th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2010.
E. Lahav, M. Karsten, T. Brecht, W. Wang, and T. Zhao, Group Unicast for the Real World, 18th International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV), 2008.
D. Hadaller, S. Keshav, T. Brecht, and S. Agarwal, Vehicular Opportunistic Communication Under the Microscope, Proceedings of Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (Mobisys), 2007.
D. Pariag, T. Brecht, A. Harji, P. Buhr, and A. Shukla, Comparing the Performance of Web Server Architectures, Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 2007.
T. Brecht, G. Janakiraman, B. Lynn, V. Saletore, Y. Turner, Evaluating Network Processing Efficiency with Processor Partitioning and Asynchronous I/O, Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 2006.
T. Brecht, E. Arjomandi, C. Li, and H. Pham, Controlling Garbage Collection and Heap Growth to Reduce the Execution Time of Java Applications, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), 28(5):908-941, 2006.
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
Tel: 519-888-4567 x33293
Fax: 519-885-1208
Contact | Feedback: cs-webmaster@cs.uwaterloo.ca | David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science | Faculty of Mathematics
Last modified: Monday, 20-Dec-2010 14:29:41 EST
