Alan Wood is the Director of the Modeling, Simulation and Optimization research group in Oracle Labs. His group provides internal consulting on a broad range of topics including retail store layout and pricing optimization algorithms, analysis of cancer data, cache replacement algorithms, load balancing and resource allocation in data bases and systems, and prognostics for early problem indicators. Alan's other research interests include software reliability, energy-efficient reliability, and application energy-efficiency - studying how applications could interact with systems to provide the same results using less energy with minimal performance impact. Recent efforts have including a fault-tolerance architecture for Parallel Query and a discrete event simulation of the SQL Sort operator with skewed data. He was the fault-tolerance lead for the DARPA HPCS project, and the technical volume captain for the Phase 3 HPCS proposal. After HPCS Phase 2, he researched switch architectures using proximity communications. Prior to joining Sun/Oracle, he worked for 13 years in the HP NonStop Division, which was originally Tandem Computers. Alan was a Distinguished Technologist at HP, in charge of fault-tolerant modeling and architecture for NonStop systems. He was the general chair for SELSE 2009-2011, serves on several program committees, and has been an officer of the local IEEE Reliability chapter for the past several years. He has over 40 published papers.