Thomas Sterling spoke on a couple of panels at the supercomputing conference SC14 that looked at the promises and pitfalls on the path to developing exascale supercomputers, the next-generation of the world's fastest computers.

Dr. Sterling is the executive associate director and chief scientist at the Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He's won the Gordon Bell Prize for innovations in high performance computing, and he laid the foundation for the current paradigm of supercomputers by co-developing the Beowulf cluster of commodity Linux cluster computing.

Sterling's latest project is the ParalleX execution model being tested in part on XSEDE resources here at TACC with the Stampede supercomputer.