Presenter

Dr. Thomas Sterling holds the position of Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Indiana University (IU) School of Informatics and Computing Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering (ISE) as well as serves as Director of the IU Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies (CREST). Since receiving his Ph.D from MIT in 1984 as a Hertz Fellow, Dr. Sterling has engaged in applied research in parallel computing system structures, semantics, and operation in industry, government labs, and academia. 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 in 1997. He led the HTMT Project sponsored by multiple agencies to explore advanced technologies and their implication for high-end computer system architectures. Other research projects in which he contributed included the DARPA DIVA PIM architecture project with USC-ISI, the DARPA HPCS program sponsored Cray-led Cascade Petaflops architecture, and the Gilgamesh high-density computing project at NASA JPL. Sterling is currently involved in research associated with the innovative ParalleX execution model for extreme scale computing to establish the foundation principles guiding the development of future generation Exascale computing systems. ParalleX is currently the conceptual centerpiece of the XPRESS project as part of the DOE X-stack program and has been demonstrated via the proof-of-concept HPX-5 runtime system software. Dr. Sterling is the co-author of seven books and holds six patents. He was the recipient of the 2013 Vanguard Award and is a Fellow of the AAAS. Most recently, he co-authored the introductory textbook, “High Performance Computing”, published by Morgan-Kaufmann in December, 2017.