Tom Rodeheffer Senior Researcher Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley Tel. +1 650.693.1722

Before joining Microsoft in 2003, Tom Rodeheffer spent eighteen years at Digital's, then Compaq's, then Hewlett-Packard's Systems Research Center (SRC) in Palo Alto, California.  As a researcher and then senior researcher, Tom investigated networks, protocols, distributed systems, hardware-software interfaces, and self-organizing systems.  For approximately the final two years, Tom was the assistant manager of SRC.  Tom received his B.S. from Ohio State in 1976 and Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon in 1985.

Tom's research centers on the design and operation of systems of communicating processes, especially when combinations of hardware and software are involved.  The essential research problem is how to arrange such a system so as to obtain a desired collective behavior, and Tom is most interested in the design of systems that self-organize and self-manage without human intervention.  Specifying a desired behavior is often a problem in itself.  Tom likes the practical approach of evaluating designs by constructing models or, where possible, working prototypes.  This approach often uncovers additional problems that were not appreciated in the original design.

Publications

• Yuan Yu, Thomas Rodeheffer, and Wei Chen.  RaceTrack: Efficient Detection of Data Race Conditions via Adaptive Tracking, In ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2005), Brighton, UK, October 23-26, 2005, 2005.
• Minwen Ji, Tom Rodeheffer, Marcos Aguilera, and Mark Lillibridge.  Generating unforgeable evidence for secure communications.  Technical Report HPL-2005-71, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, May 2005.  Available from http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2005/HPL-2005-71.html
• Yuan Yu, Thomas Rodeheffer, and Wei Chen.  RaceTrack: Efficient detection of data race conditions via adaptive tracking.  Technical Report MSR-TR-2005-54, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, April 2005.  Available from ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2005-54.pdf
• Thomas Rodeheffer.  Monitoring Ethernet connectivity.  Technical Report HPL-2003-160, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, July 2003.  Available from http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2003/HPL-2003-160.html
• Thomas Rodeheffer, Chandramohan Thekkath, and Darrell Anderson.  Smartbridge: a scalable bridge architecture.  In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2000, pages 205-216, August 2000.
• Hannes Marais and Tom Rodeheffer.  Automating the Web with WebL.  In Dr. Dobb's Journal, 24(1):20-27, January 1999.
• Thomas Rodeheffer and James B. Saxe.  An efficient matching algorithm for a high-throughput, low-latency data switch.  Research Report 162, Compaq Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, November 1998.  Also indexed as Technical Note 1998-008, Compaq Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, November 1998.  Available from http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-162.html
• Thomas Rodeheffer and James B. Saxe.  Smooth scheduling in a cell-based switching network.  Research Report 150, Digital Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, February 1998.  Available from http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-150.html
• Michael D. Schroeder, Andrew D. Birrell, Michael Burrows, Hal Murray, Roger M. Needham, Thomas Rodeheffer, Ed Satterthwaite, and Chuck Thacker.  Autonet: a high-speed, self-configuring local area network using point-to-point links.  In IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 9(8), October 1991.  Also appeared as Research Report 59, Digital Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, April 1990, which is available from http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-59.html
• Thomas Rodeheffer and Michael D. Schroeder.  Automatic reconfiguration in Autonet.  In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pages 183-187, 1991.  Also appeared as Research Report 77, Digital Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, September 1991, which is available from http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-77.html
• Thomas Rodeheffer.  Experience with Autonet.  In Preliminary Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Workshop on Very High Speed Networks, pages 268-277, May 1991.

Patents

• Thomas Rodeheffer, Mark Lillibridge, and Chandramohan Thekkath.  Method and system for initializing host location information across smart bridge topology changes.  U.S. Patent Allowed February 17, 2005.
• Thomas Rodeheffer and Erwin Oertli.  System and method for scrubbing errors in very large memories.  U.S. Patent 6,848,063, January 2005.
• Thomas Rodeheffer, Darrell Anderson, Chandramohan Thekkath, Raymond Stata, and Mark Lillibridge.  Bridged network stations location revision.  U.S. Patent 6,721,275, April 2004.
• Thomas Rodeheffer, Darrell Anderson, Chandramohan Thekkath, and Mark Lillibridge.  Bridged network topology acquisition.  U.S. Patent 6,614,764, September 2003.
• Martin Abadi and Thomas Rodeheffer.  Method for avoiding broadcast deadlocks in a mesh-connected network.  U.S. Patent 6,480,502, November 2002.
• Thomas Rodeheffer.  Intermittent component failure manager and method for minimizing disruption of distributed computer system.  U.S. Patent 5,260,945, November 1993.
• Leslie Lamport, Thomas Rodeheffer, and Mani Chandy.  Reconfiguration system and method for high-speeed mesh connected local area network.  U.S. Patent 5,138,615, August 1992.
• Thomas Rodeheffer.  Rotating priority encoder operating by selectively masking input signals to a fixed priorioty encoder.  U.S. Patent 5,095,460, March 1992.
• Michael D. Schroeder, Andrew D. Birrell, Hal Murray, Thomas Rodeheffer, Ed Satterthwaite, Chuck Thacker, and Roger M. Needham.  High-speed mesh connected local area network.  U.S. Patent 5,088,091, February 1992.