Rate My Professor Thomas Sterling

Indiana University Bloomington

Computer Science Engineering Space Science Computer Architecture Computational Sciences Distributed Computing Parallel Computing

4.5

2 reviews · out of 5

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Ratings & reviews

5.05/4/2026

Inspires students to achieve their best.

4.06/27/2025

Inspires students to aim high and excel.

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About Thomas

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.