Chandu Thekkath has returned to the ranks of MSR-SVC after a two-year stint as the Director of the Platforms and Distributed Systems Group in ISRC within Microsoft Research. Before that he was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley. In that position, he worked closely with the Hotmail team on the Blue project, before which he worked on the Boxwood and Koh-i-Noor projects. He worked as the interim head of the Hardware, Communications, and Systems group in Microsoft Research, Bangalore during 2006. He joined Microsoft in 2001 from the DEC/Compaq Systems Research Center, where he held the positions of Principal Engineer, Consulting Engineer, and Manager (Distributed Systems).
At DEC, Thekkath’s most influential work was the Petal/Frangipani project jointly done with E. Lee and T. Mann. This system supported a scalable, distributed virtual disk and file system. It was completed (and made public) in 1997 and influenced the design of Compaq’s VersaStore products and predates many of the storage and NAS appliances in the industry today. Thekkath was also a principal in the XOM project (done jointly with D. Lie, M. Horowitz, D. Boneh, and J. Mitchell), which was started when he was on a sabbatical at Stanford in 2000. XOM has many of the same ideas as Palladium and evolved independently and coevally to it. In addition, Thekkath was a co-developer (with T. Rodeheffer and D. Anderson) of the SmartBridges system, an alternative to Ethernet bridging for LANs.
Thekkath’s research expertise spans operating systems, distributed systems, and networks. He holds several patents in operating systems, networks, distributed systems, and computer architecture. He has published a variety of papers in the premier conferences on experimental computers systems such as SOSP, ASPLOS, SIGCOMM, and OSDI. He has also served on the programme committees of SOSP, ASPLOS, OSDI, NSDI, and FAST, which he also chaired in 2004.
Thekkath received a BTech. in EE (Electronics) from IIT Madras in 1982, an M.S. in EE from UC Santa Barbara in 1983, an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1994. He worked as a software development engineer at Monolithic Memories Inc. (now part of AMD) and Hewlett Packard between 1983 and 1988.
Thekkath used to be an avid sailor, but with two children who refuse to sit still unless belted into a seat, he has given up sailing for flying. He is a certified instrument flight and ground instructor. His cunning plan is to earn his living as an instructor in case the computer phenomenon turns out to be a passing fad. More information is available at www.thekkath.org.
