Cheriton founded and led the Distributed Systems Group at Stanford University, which developed the V operating system. He has published profusely in the areas of Distributed Systems and Networking and has won the prestigious SIGCOMM award in 2003, in recognition for his lifetime contribution to the field of communication networks. 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).