Background

I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2008. Prior to that I spent fifteen years as an engineer in industry, at Apple, Motorola, and a number of start-ups. I received the BS and MS degrees in EECS from MIT in 1988.

Research

My research focuses on operating systems and storage, drawing on my experience to explore practical solutions to the problems of tomorrow's applications and devices. I am particularly interested in:

• Novel applications of flash storage. High density NAND flash memory occupies a midpoint in cost and performance between RAM and magnetic disks, with different characteristics than either. Will we use it as just a fast disk, running disk-optimized file systems, or can we do better?
• Stream storage and querying. Many evolving applications involve streams of data arriving from the external world which must be stored and later queried to retrieve selected parts. How do we construct efficient "write-mostly" storage systems for these applications, and how do we locate and retrieve data in such a system?

Teaching

CS G112, Computer Systems (MS Core) - Fall 2008.

If you are a student looking for information on this course, please email me - the class website is on Blackboard, but I can easily enroll you as a guest to give you access.

Publications

Gaurav Mathur, Peter Desnoyers, Paul Chukiu, Deepak Ganesan, Prashant Shenoy, Ultra-Low Power Data Storage for Sensor Networks. Submitted to Transactions on Sensor Networks, 2008.

Peter Desnoyers, Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy,  Sangameshwar Patil, Harrick Vin. Modellus: Automated Modeling of Complex Data Center  Applications . University of Massachusetts  Technical Report TR31-07, 2007.

Timothy Wood, Gabriel Tarasuk-Levin, Jim Cipar, Peter Desnoyers, Prashant Shenoy, Mark Corner and Emery Berger, Memory Buddies: Exploiting Page Sharing for Server  Consolidation in Virtualized Data Centers.  University of Massachusetts  Technical Report TR36-07, 2007.

Peter J. Desnoyers and Prashant Shenoy, Hyperion: High Volume Stream Archival for Retrospective Querying. Proceedings of the 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Santa Clara CA, June 17-22 2007. (best paper award) (tech report)

Boulat A. Bash and Peter J. Desnoyers, Exact Distributed Voronoi Cell Computation in Sensor Networks. Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE/ACM Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), Cambridge MA, April 25 - 27, 2007.

Gaurav Mathur, Peter Desnoyers, Deepak Ganesan and Prashant Shenoy, Capsule: An Energy-Optimized Object Storage System for Memory-Constrained Sensor Devices. Proceedings of the Fourth ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), Boulder CO, November 1 - 3, 2006.

Gaurav Mathur, Paul Chukiu, Peter Desnoyers, Deepak Ganesan and Prashant Shenoy, A Storage-centric Camera Sensor Network. Demonstration at the Fourth ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), Boulder CO, November 1 - 3, 2006.

Gaurav Mathur , Peter Desnoyers , Deepak Ganesan and Prashant Shenoy, Ultra-Low Power Storage for Sensor Networks. Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE/ACM Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks - Track on Sensor Platform, Tools and Design Methods for Networked Embedded Systems (IPSN-SPOTS), Nashville TN, April 19 - 21, 2006.

Peter Desnoyers, Deepak Ganesan and Prashant Shenoy,TSAR: A Two Tier Storage Architecture Using Interval Skip Graphs. Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), November 2005. San Diego, CA.  (slides: powerpoint , pdf )

Peter Desnoyers, Deepak Ganesan, Huan Li and Prashant Shenoy,  PRESTO: A Predictive Storage Architecture for Sensor Networks. Tenth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS X), June 2005. Santa Fe, NM.

Peter Desnoyers, Distributed Data Collection: Archiving, Indexing, and Analysis. PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, October 2007.

Resources