Biography

Dr. Craig A. Stewart has been for decades a leading innovator and strategist in advanced computing and cyberinfrastructure for research and development. The peak of his professional career was from 2005 through 2020, leading the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute. IU PTI is Indiana University’s flagship organization for research and development in cyberinfrastructure, informatics, and computer science in support of science and engineering research, artistic creativity, and cybersecurity. (Stewart’s group coined the now standard definition of cyberinfrastructure – see hdl.handle.net/2022/21589). Stewart has been involved in research computing since writing Fortran-based statistical applications while completing his Ph.D. in Biology in the 1980s. From 1996 to 2017, Stewart was responsible for all aspects of IU’s supercomputer and research software services and operations. From 2005 to 2017, Stewart was Associate Dean for Research Technologies and, as such, was responsible for all supercomputers, research data storage systems, and visualization systems. These responsibilities included supercomputers ranked among the top 25 fastest in the world and state-of-the art Virtual Reality systems such as CAVEs and BARCO VR Theatres. Stewart’s group created the software needed to build the first-ever distributed installation of the High Performance Storage System (HPSS), and he was PI on the NSF grant that created the Lustre-based Data Capacitor. Stewart oversaw the implementation of the first 1 TeraFLOPS supercomputer and the first 1 PetaFLOPS supercomputer owned and funded by a single university (2001 & 2013, respectively). Stewart was the primary writer and/or PI of the grants that enabled IU to play a major role in the NSF-funded national cyberinfrastructure systems starting in 2003 with the TeraGrid and then up to today as part of XSEDE. Stewart was the founding PI of Jetstream, the first cloud computing system funded by the National Science Foundation for use by the science and engineering community of the US. He has been the principal investigator for, primary writer of, or major contributor to grant proposals bringing more than $250M in funding to Indiana University and has supervised groups bringing in another more than $100M in funding.

Research in life sciences and medicine have been particular areas of focus throughout Stewart’s career. Starting in 2007 Stewart set a goal of having all of IU’s central research IT systems aligned with HIPAA (compute and storage), a goal that was accomplished in 2009. IU was the first US (nonclassified) supercomputer center to do this. Security of IU’s research systems was most recently upgraded to compliance with FISMA Low. Stewart was also the initial Principal Investigator on the NSF grant that created the National Center for Genome Analysis Support, a resource serving genomic scientists throughout the US from 2011 to 2021.