Timothy Harris

Timothy Harris is an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge's Department of Computer Science and Technology, where he jointly teaches courses on multicore semantics and programming. Currently, he works at OpenAI, focusing on performance optimization for GPU inference of large language models, including the Azure OpenAI Service. Previously, he held roles at Microsoft, AWS, Oracle Labs, and was a faculty member at the University of Cambridge (2000–2004). His research spans distributed systems, runtime systems, operating systems, and high-performance computing, with an emphasis on scalability and performance. He contributed to projects like the Xen hypervisor and the Barrelfish research OS.

Key research interests include distributed training of PyTorch models in the ONNX runtime, large-scale storage performance with Amazon S3, and runtime systems for in-memory graph analytics. His work often bridges 'big data' and high-performance computing techniques. Notable contributions include the book Transactional Memory (2010) and the Barrelfish OS, alongside numerous publications in top-tier conferences like SOSP, ASPLOS, and EuroSys. He has served as PC chair for ISMM 2025, VEE 2017, and EuroSys 2015, reflecting his leadership in the systems research community.

His awards include a Best Paper Award at PACT 2010. Beyond academia, Harris is an avid hiker, aiming to complete the UK coastline, and maintains a photography portfolio at tlhphotography.uk.