Thomas Sterling serves as Professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering and is affiliated with the Computer Science department at Indiana University Bloomington within the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984, supported by a Hertz Fellowship. Dr. Sterling is widely recognized as the pioneer of Beowulf cluster computing, having led the development of the first Beowulf-class system at NASA in the mid-1990s. For this breakthrough in leveraging commodity hardware for high-performance scientific computation, his team received the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize in 1997. Prior to his tenure at Indiana University, where he also directed the Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies (CREST), Sterling held key positions at Harris Corporation, the IDA Supercomputing Research Center, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, University of Maryland, California Institute of Technology, and Louisiana State University.

His research centers on supercomputing architectures, parallel system software, and runtime systems, exemplified by his leadership in the HPX project—a lightweight message-driven runtime for extreme scale computing. Highly cited publications include "Exascale Computing Study: Technology Challenges in Achieving Exascale Systems" (2008, 1522 citations), "BEOWULF: A Parallel Workstation for Scientific Computation" (1995, 1231 citations), and "The International Exascale Software Project Roadmap" (2011, 967 citations). Sterling has co-authored seven books, including "Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux" (MIT Press, 2002), "High Performance Computing: Modern Systems and Practices" (Morgan Kaufmann, 2018; second edition 2024), and "UPC: Distributed Shared Memory Programming" (Wiley, 2005). Among his honors are the 2013 Vanguard Award, Fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and induction into the Space Technologies Hall of Fame. He holds six patents. In 2023, Sterling and Luddy School colleagues Martin Swany and Ariful Azad secured a three-year $5.4 million government contract for advanced computing research. He teaches courses such as High Performance Computing.

Professional Email: tron@indiana.edu