Dr. Thomas Sterling received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1984 and has held research scientist positions with the Harris Corporations' Advanced Technology Department, the IDA Supercomputing Research Center, and the USRA Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences. In 1996 Dr. Sterling received a joint appointment at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's High Performance Computing group where he is a Principal Scientist and the California Institute of Technology's Center for Advanced Computing
Research where he is a Faculty Associate. For the last 20 years, he has engaged in applied research in parallel processing hardware and software systems for high performance computing. Sterling was a developer of the Concert shared memory multiprocessor, the YARC static dataflow computer, and the Associative Template Dataflow computer concept and has conducted extensive studies of distributed shared memory cache coherence systems. In 1994, Dr. Sterling led the team at the NASA Goddard Space
Flight Center that developed the first Beowulf-class PC clusters including the Ethernet networking software for the Linux operating system and is an author of the 1999 book, "How to Build a Beowulf" published by MIT Press. Since 1994, Sterling has been a leader in the national Petaflops initiative chairing three workshops on petaflops systems development and chairing the subgroup on the Petaflops computing implementation plan for the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. He is also an author of the book, "Enabling Technologies for Petaflops Computing" published by MIT Press in 1995. Sterling was the Principal Investigator for the interdisciplinary Hybrid Technology Multithreaded (HTMT) architecture research project sponsored by NASA, NSA, NSF, and DARPA which ended in 2000. Currently, Sterling is Principal Investigator leading the Gilgamesh Architecture research project sponsored by NASA.