Dr Thomas Sterling has become the first recipient of the HPC Vanguard Award in recognition of his outstanding leadership role in the HPC community’s strategic push to achieve exascale levels of supercomputing performance.
Sterling was presented the award at the SC13 conference in Denver by Mike Bernhardt, publisher of The Exascale Report and creator of the award. Dr Sterling was one of six award finalists chosen by the votes from hundreds of members of the HPC community.
Sterling is professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University. He serves as the executive associate director of CREST and as its chief scientist. He is most widely known for his pioneering work in commodity cluster computing as leader of the Beowulf Project, for which he and colleagues were awarded the Gordon Bell Prize. Sterling currently leads a team of researchers at IU to derive the advanced ParalleX execution model and develop a proof-of-concept reference implementation to enable a new generation of extreme scale computing systems and applications. He is the co-author of six books and holds six patents.
'The HPC Vanguard Award recognises one individual as a critically important driving force in the HPC community,' said Bernhardt speaking at the award ceremony. 'A person who consistently leads, pushes the envelope, is always open to new, innovative thinking, who is paramount to moving the community toward exascale.
'Thomas Sterling exemplifies all of these qualities and is a worthy first recipient of this award – an award that represents the voice of the emerging exascale community.'
