Tushar Thole

Currently I am a second year Masters Student in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University.

I graduated with rank#1 from Vishwakarma Institute of Technology affiliated to University of Pune, India with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering in 2004. I was awarded as the Best Outgoing Student of Computer Engineering Department.

I did my senior year project at C-DAC, Pune which is an elite research organization of India. At C-DAC, we built a preprocessor (modeling tool) and a post processor (visualization tool) module in a structural mechanics application ‘INTEGRA’ for Scientific and Engineering Computing Group. INTEGRA won 1^st and 3^rd prize in the inter college project exhibitions sponsored by Honeywell and SunGard respectively.

Following that I spent two years at Calsoft Pvt. Ltd, Pune where I worked for Panasas Inc on their object based distributed filesystem ‘PANFS’.

At Calsoft I was also involved in recruitment and mentoring. I mentored a group of 4 interns to build a prototype for a ‘Virtual Private Server’ which won the first prize in Redhat’s Lord of the Code contest in 2005.

While I was at Calsoft, I also served as a visiting faculty at my alma mater VIT, Pune for the course of ‘Advanced UNIX Programming’ to the class of senior year students.

After a stint of two years in the storage industry I decided to pursue graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University to specialize in systems domain. CS department at Hopkins offers a great variety of courses in this area! Do have a look at my courses and projects to know more.

After joining Hopkins, I worked as a graduate assistant to Prof. Randal Burns in Hopkins Storage Systems Laboratory on ‘Improving I/O performance through aggressive swapping’.

I had an amazing time during the summer of 2007 working for VMware with their incredible Storage Management team on ‘Storage I/O load balancing algorithms’. My work at VMware involved the design and implementation of algorithmic building blocks for a global, data center wide I/O load balancing algorithm to reduce the storage bottleneck in a virtualized environment.

I absolutely loved the stuff I was working on and hence I accepted an offer to continue working for VMware as a part time intern for their Core Management team. It’s a lot of hard work but I am enjoying it!