Thomas Sterling, PhD

Thomas Sterling is professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering at Indiana University, a computer scientist who pioneered the Beowulf cluster architecture and contributed to the development of next-generation computing paradigms. Sterling earned his undergraduate degree from Old Dominion University before completing his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at MIT, where his fellowship began in 1980. He co-invented the Beowulf cluster computing architecture in 1994 with Donald Becker, demonstrating that commodity off-the-shelf hardware networked together could provide supercomputer-class performance at a fraction of the cost—a concept that transformed high-performance computing and now underlies much of the modern computational infrastructure of science. He subsequently developed the ParalleX execution model for next-generation exascale computing.