Michael D. Schroeder

Updated 14 October 2024

mike@schroederpr.com

Michael D. Schroeder was the co-founder and Assistant Director of the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Lab from its founding in August of 2001 until it was disbanded in September of 2014.

Previously, he was at the Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center in Palo Alto CA for 14 years, the Computer Science Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for 8 years, and the EECS department at MIT, as a professor, for 4 years. He grew up in eastern Washington State and received his BS from Washington State University; and an MS, an EE, and a PhD in Computer Science from MIT.

He has worked on time-sharing, computer security, distributed email systems, remote procedure call, switch-based local area networks, large-scale naming systems, global cluster file systems, and web-based access to personal information. He was co-inventor of the Needham-Schroeder authentication protocol, and a designer / builder of the Multics time sharing system, the Grapevine distributed email system, the Cedar distributed file system, the Topaz distributed operating system, the Autonet and AN2 switch-based LANs, and the Pachyderm web-based email system. He holds a number of patents on switch-based LANs and web-based email systems.

He has been a program committee member for numerous first-ranked Computer Systems conferences and Security/Privacy/Protection conferences. He is a Lifetime Member and Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He has been general chairman and program committee member for various ACM SIGOPS Symposia on Operating Systems Principles, of which he has attended every instance since 1971.

In 2006 he received the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovations Award for technical contributions to the field of computer and communication security that have had lasting impact in furthering or understanding the theory and/or development of commercial systems. In 2008 he received the NIST/NSA 'National Computer Systems Security Award', presented for significant long-term contributions in the computer security field. In 2008 and again in 2010 he received the ACM SIGOPS 'Hall of Fame Award' that recognizes the most influential operating systems papers in the peer-reviewed literature at least ten years old. He was program co-chair for the 2012 ACM A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration whose program included 33 Turing Award Winners. In 2019 he received the IEEE Computer Society Social Technical Committee on Security and Privacy 'Test of Time Award' recognizing flagship papers that have had a lasting impact on the field.

Since the mid 1990s he has been involved in technical outreach activities exploring the impact of the web on the methodology of cultural history. He is the world's leading authority on the 19th Century American landscape artist Gilbert Munger and he authors the Gilbert Munger online catalog raisonne.

An online computer science bibliography provided by the Libniz Center for Informatics lists other sources for some of these papers and reports.

• Michael D. Schroeder, Systems Work at Microsoft Research, in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., April 2007
• Michael D. Schroeder, Using Sharing to Simplify System Management, in Computer Systems: Theory, Technology, and Applications, Springer-Verlag, August 2004
• Michael D. Schroeder and J. Gray Sweeney, Gilbert Munger: Quest for Distinction, Afton Historical Society Press, July 2003
• Michael D. Schroeder and J. Gray Sweeney, Gilbert Munger's quest for distinction, in The Magazine Antiques, Brandt Publications, Inc., July 2003
• Michael D. Schroeder, On the impact of academic distributed systems research on industrial practice, in Future Directions in Distributed Computing 2002, Springer-Verlag, July 2003
• Michael D. Schroeder, The Art of Gilbert Munger: Catalog of Works & Chronological Document Archive, A website, September 1999 - continuing
• Michael D. Schroeder, Gilbert Munger's Paintings of Lake Marian, in St. Louis County Historical Society Newsletter, September 1999
• Andrew Birrell, Mike Schroeder, Raymie Stata, and Ted Wobber, Pachyderm: a Strategy for Working on the Web, October 1997
• Andrew Birrell, Mike Schroeder, Raymie Stata, and Ted Wobber, Pachyderm Web Site, 1997
• Charles P. Thacker and Michael D. Schroeder, AN2: A High-Performance ATM Switch, March 1995
• Thomas L. Rodeheffer and Michael D. Schroeder, A case study: Automatic reconfiguration in Autonet, Chapter 11 in Distributed Systems, Addison-Wesley, June 1993
• Michael D. Schroeder, A State-of-the-Art Distributed System: Computing with BOB, Chapter 1 in Distributed Systems, Addison-Wesley, June 1993
• Michael D. Schroeder, "Software Clercks (Clerks)", in 5th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop: Models and Pardigms for Distributed Systems Structuring, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., September 1992
• Michael D. Schroeder, How can we make operating systems research more effective?, in Operating Systems Review, vol 26, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., January 1992
• Michael Schroeder, Andrew Birrell, Mike Burrows, Hal Murray, Roger Needham, Tom Rodeheffer, Ed Satterthwaite, and Chuck Thacker, Autonet: A High-Speed, Self-Configuring Local Area Network Using Point-to-Point Links in IEEE Journal on Select Areas of Communication, vol. 9, no. 8, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., October 1991. Alternate versions of this report are available at Google Scholar.
• Thomas L. Rodeheffer and Michael D. Schroeder, Automatic Reconfiguration in Autonet, in SOSP Symposium on Operating Systems Principles '91, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 1991
• Andy Hisgen, Andrew Birrell, Chuck Jerian, Tim Mann, Michael D. Schroeder, and Garret Swart, Granularity and semantic level of replication in the Echo distributed file system, in Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on the Management of Replicated Data, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., November 1990
• Michael Burrows and M. D. Schroeder, Performance of Firefly RPC, in ACM Transaction on Computer Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., February 1990
• Butler Lampson, Michael Schroeder, and Andrew Birrell, A Distributed Systems Architecture for the 1990's, December 1989
• Andy Hisgen, Andrew Birrell, Tim Mann, Michael D. Schroeder, and Garret Swart, Availability and Consistency Tradeoffs in the Echo Distributed File System, in Proceeding of the 2nd IEEE Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., September 1989
• Michael D. Schroeder, Autonomy or interdependence in distributed systems, in Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on ACM SIGOPS European workshop: Autonomy or interdependence in distributed systems? Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., September 1988
• David K. Gifford, Roger M. Needham, and Michael D. Schroeder, The Cedar File System, in Communications of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., March 1988
• Roger M. Needham and Michael D. Schroeder, Authentication Revisited, in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., January 1987
• Andrew Birrell, Butler W. Lampson, Roger Needham, and Michael D. Schroeder, A Global Authentication Service without Global Trust, in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., April 1986
• Andrew Birrell, Butler W. Lampson, Roger Needham, and Michael D. Schroeder, Current work on authentication, in ACM SIGOPS European Workshop: Making Distributed Systems Work, 1986
• Functionally distributed systems, In Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Operating systems in computer networks, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., December 13, 1985.
• David K. Gifford, Roger M. Needham, and Michael D. Schroeder, A caching file system for a programmer's workstation, in Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Opeating Systems Principles, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., November 1985
• M.D. Schroeder, Andrew Birrell, and Roger Needham, Experience with Grapevine: The Growth of a Distributed System, in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 2, no. 1, February 1984
• Andrew Birrell, Roy Levin, Roger Needham, and Michael D. Schroeder, Grapevine: An exercise in distributed computing, in Communications of the ACM, vol. 25, no. 4, April 1982
• Roger M. Needham and Michael D. Schroeder, Using Encryption for authentication in large networks of computers, in Communications of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery,Inc., December 1978
• Michael D. Schroeder, David D. Clark, and Jerome H. Saltzer, The Multics kernel design project, in Procedings of the 6th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., November 1977
• Michael D. Schroeder, Engineering a security kernel for Multics, in Proceedings of the 5th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., October 1975
• Jerome H. Saltzer and Michael D. Schroeder, The protection of information in computer systems, in Proceedings of the IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., September 1975
• Michael D. Schroeder, Report of session on concurrency, in ACM SIGPLAN Notices -- Proceeding of ACM SIGPLAN-SIGOPS interface meeting on Programming languages - operating systems, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., September 1973
• Michael D. Schroeder, A brief report of the SIGPLAN/SIGOPS interface meeting, in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., July 1973
• Michael D. Schroeder, Cooperation of Mutually Suspicious Subsystems in a Computer Utility, MIT PhD thesis, September 1972
• Michael D. Schroeder and Jerome H. Saltzer, A hardware architecture for implementing protection rings, in Communications of the ACM & Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., March 1972
• Michael D. Schroeder, Performance of the GE-645 associative memory while Multics is in operation, in Procedings of ACM SIGOPS Workshop on System Performance Evaluation, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., April 1971