Thomas Sterling

Thomas Sterling is a Senior Research Scientist and Director of Advanced Future Architecture at the Texas Advanced Computing Center associated with the University of Texas at Austin. For the previous 13 years he was a Full Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. Since receiving his Ph.D from MIT as a Hertz Fellow in 1984, Dr. Sterling has engaged in applied research in parallel computing system structures, semantics, and operation in industry, government labs, and academia. Professional affiliations have included Harris Corp., IDA Supercomputing Research Center, NASA (GSFC, JPL), Un. of Maryland, Caltech, and Louisiana State University. Dr. Sterling is best known as the "father of Beowulf" for his pioneering research in commodity/Linux cluster computing for which he shared the Gordon Bell Prize in1997. His current research is associated with extreme scale computing through memory-centric non von Neumann architecture concepts to accelerate dynamic graph processing for AI. This work is currently in the advanced design phase of a 6-year project to extend computing performance beyond Moore’s Law and nanoscale towards the realm of Zettaflops operation. Dr. Sterling was the recipient of the 2013 Vanguard Award, the ICPP Test-of-Time Award, inducted in the Space Technologies Hall of Fame, selected as a “35 HPCwire Legends and Luminaries”, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and is a Fellow of the AAAS. He is noted for his hundreds of invited presentations both national and international. Sterling is the co-author of seven books including “Enabling Technologies for Petaflops Computing” and “How to Build a Beowulf” and holds seven patents. Most recently, he co-authored the 2nd edition of the introductory textbook: “High Performance Computing Modern Systems and Practices”, published by Morgan-Kaufmann, 2025. He will be given the Seymour Cray Award in November, 2026.