David Ross Cheriton (born March 29, 1951) is a Canadian computer scientist, mathematician, billionaire businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group. He is a

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

and

computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

ing expert, with insight into identifying big market opportunities and building the architectures needed to address such opportunities. He has founded and invested in technology companies, including

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

, where he was among the first angel investors;

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

, where he was an early investor; and Arista, where he was cofounder and chief scientist. He has funded at least 20 companies. Cheriton was ranked by

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also r ...

with an estimated net worth of

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

8.8

billion Billion is a word for a large number, and it has two distinct definitions: *1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million, or (ten to the ninth power), as defined on the short scale. This is its only current meaning in English. * 1,000,000,000,000, i. ...

, as of April 2021. He has made contributions to education, with a $25 million donation to support graduate studies and research in the School of Computer Science (subsequently renamed David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science) at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates ...

, a $7.5 million donation to the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top thre ...

, and a $12 million endowment in 2016 to Stanford University to support Computer Science faculty, graduate fellowships, and undergraduate scholarships.

Education

Born in

Vancouver Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

British Columbia British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, ...

, Canada, Cheriton attended public schools in the

Highlands Highland is a broad term for areas of higher elevation, such as a mountain range or mountainous plateau. Highland, Highlands, or The Highlands, may also refer to: Places Albania * Dukagjin Highlands Armenia * Armenian Highlands Australia *Sou ...

neighborhood of

Edmonton Edmonton ( ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Alberta. Edmonton is situated on the North Saskatchewan River and is the centre of the Edmonton Metropolitan Region, which is surrounded by Alberta's central region. The city ancho ...

Alberta Alberta ( ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is part of Western Canada and is one of the three prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to the west, Saskatchewan to the east, the Northwest Ter ...

, Canada. He briefly attended the

University of Alberta The University of Alberta, also known as U of A or UAlberta, is a Public university, public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford,"A Gentleman of Strathcona – Alexande ...

where he had applied for both mathematics and music. He was rejected by the music program, and then went on to study mathematics and received his

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

(B.S.) degree from the

in 1973. Cheriton received his

Master of Science A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast t ...

(M.S.) and

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

(Ph.D.) degrees in computer science from the

in 1974 and 1978, respectively. He spent three years as an assistant professor at his Alma mater, the University of British Columbia, before moving to Stanford.

Research

Cheriton was involved in creating three

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

s (OSes). He was one of the early principal developers of

Thoth Thoth (; from grc-koi, Θώθ ''Thṓth'', borrowed from cop, Ⲑⲱⲟⲩⲧ ''Thōout'', Egyptian: ', the reflex of " eis like the Ibis") is an ancient Egyptian deity. In art, he was often depicted as a man with the head of an ibis or ...

, a

real-time operating system A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) for real-time applications that processes data and events that have critically defined time constraints. An RTOS is distinct from a time-sharing operating system, such as Unix, which m ...

, and then the Verex

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learn ...

. He then founded and led the Distributed Systems Group at Stanford University, which developed a microkernel OS named V. He has published profusely in the areas of

and

ing. He won the prestigious SIGCOMM award in 2003, in recognition for his lifetime contribution to the field of

telecommunications network A telecommunications network is a group of nodes interconnected by telecommunications links that are used to exchange messages between the nodes. The links may use a variety of technologies based on the methodologies of circuit switching, mes ...

s. Cheriton was the mentor and advisor of students such as: Sergey Brin and Larry Page (founders of Google), Kenneth Duda (founder of Arista Networks), Hugh Holbrook (VP Software Engineering at Arista Networks), Sandeep Singhal (was GM at Microsoft, now at Google), and Kieran Harty (CTO and founder of Tintri). As of 2016, Cheriton is working with Stanford students on

transactional memory In computer science and engineering, transactional memory attempts to simplify concurrent programming by allowing a group of load and store instructions to execute in an atomic way. It is a concurrency control mechanism analogous to database transa ...

, making memory systems that are resilient to failures.

Industry

Cheriton cofounded Granite Systems with Andy Bechtolsheim. The company developed

gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use ...

products. It was acquired by

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

in 1996. In August 1998, Stanford students

Sergey Brin Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (russian: link=no, Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur, who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin was th ...

and

Larry Page Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin. Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 unti ...

met Bechtolsheim on Cheriton's front porch. At the meeting, Bechtolsheim wrote the first cheque to fund their company,

, and Cheriton joined him as an angel investor with a $200,000 investment. Cheriton was also an early investor in compute

virtualization In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, stor ...

leader

, which was later acquired for $625M by EMC in 2004. VMware had a successful public offering in 2007. In 2001 Cheriton and Bechtolsheim founded another start-up company, Palo Alto based Kealia. Kealia designed a high-capacity streaming video server; Galaxy, a range of servers based on AMD's

Opteron Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64 or AMD64). It was released on April 22, 2003, with the ''Sledg ...

microprocessor; and Thumper, an enterprise-grade

network attached storage Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level (as opposed to block-level storage) computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the tech ...

system. Kealia was bought by Sun Microsystems in 2004, with Thumper becoming the

Sun Fire X4500 The Sun Fire X4500 data server (code named Thumper) integrates server and storage technologies. It was announced in July, 2006 and is part of the Sun Fire server line from Sun Microsystems. In July 2008, Sun announced the X4540 model (code-named ...

. In 2004, Cheriton cofounded (again with Bechtolsheim) and was chief scientist of

Arista Networks Arista Networks (formerly Arastra) is an American computer networking company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company designs and sells multilayer network switches to deliver software-defined networking (SDN) for large datacenter ...

, where he worked on the foundations of the Extensible Operating System (EOS). Arista had a successful public offering in 2014. Cheriton is an investor in and advisory board member for frontline data warehouse company Aster Data Systems, which was acquired by

Teradata Teradata Corporation is an American software company that provides cloud database and analytics-related software, products, and services. The company was formed in 1979 in Brentwood, California, as a collaboration between researchers at Caltech ...

in 2011 for $263M. Cheriton is also one of the earliest investors in Tintri, a storage virtualization company founded by his student Kieran Harty. Cheriton was also an early investor in in-video advertising company Zunavision, and he founded OptumSoft. In 2014, Cheriton cofounded and invested in Apstra, Inc. In 2015, he cofounded and invested in BrainofT, Inc. (Caspar).

Lifestyle

Although the Google investment alone would be worth over

1 billion, Cheriton has a reputation for a frugal lifestyle, avoiding costly cars or large houses. He was once included in a list of "cheapskate billionaires". On November 18, 2005, the

announced that Cheriton had donated $25 million to support graduate studies and research in its School of Computer Science. In recognition of his contribution, the school was renamed the '' David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science''. In 2009, he donated $2 million to the

, which will go to fund the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI). He more recently donated $7.5M to fund a new chair in computing, and a new course on computational thinking. Cheriton has also funded two graduate student fellowships and one undergrad fellowship at Stanford, and donated several millions of dollars to Stanford to fund research. He campaigned against

Asynchronous Transfer Mode Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a telecommunications standard defined by American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ITU-T (formerly CCITT) for digital transmission of multiple types of traffic. ATM was developed to meet the needs of ...

(ATM) that was favored by telephone carriers, preferring

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1 ...

, which he saw as a simpler, proven option. Ethernet gradually superseded alternatives.

Personal life

In 1980, Cheriton married Iris Fraser. They had four children and divorced in 1994. According to public record, Cheriton made a total of over $5,000 donations to the presidential candidate

Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021. Trump graduated from the Wharton School of the University of P ...

in 2019.

References

External links

*
Stanford University Distributed Systems Group

Founder of Intent Based Networking Company Apstra

David Cheriton speaks at the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Great Debate
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cheriton, David 1951 births Living people Businesspeople from Vancouver Canadian billionaires Canadian computer businesspeople Canadian computer scientists Canadian expatriate academics in the United States Canadian mathematicians Canadian technology chief executives Canadian technology company founders Canadian venture capitalists Scientists from Vancouver Stanford University School of Engineering faculty University of British Columbia Faculty of Science alumni University of British Columbia faculty University of Waterloo alumni