Professional BiographyShort
Professional Biography lsmarr@ucsd.edu Larry Smarr became founding director in 2000 of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a University of California San Diego/UC Irvine partnership. He holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in the Jacobs School’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD. For the previous 15 years as founding director of both the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the National Computational Science Alliance, Smarr helped drive major developments in the planetary information infrastructure: the Internet, the Web, scientific visualization, virtual reality, collaboratories, and global telepresence. His views have been quoted in Science, Nature, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Wired, Fortune, Business Week, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, and the Australian Broadcasting Company. He gives frequent keynote addresses (www.calit2.net/newsroom/presentations/lsmarr/index.php) at professional conferences and to popular audiences. Smarr serves as PI on the NSF’s OptIPuter and the Moore Foundation’s CAMERA microbial metagenomics projects, as well as co-PI on the NSF GreenLight Project. Smarr was a member of President Clinton’s Information Technology Advisory Committee and served until 2005 on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and the NASA Advisory Council. He served on Governor Schwarzenegger’s California Broadband Taskforce in 2007. Smarr received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975 and conducted observational, theoretical, and computational based astrophysical sciences research for the next 20 years. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1990 he received the Franklin Institute's Delmer S. Fahrney Gold Medal for Leadership in Science or Technology. In 2006 he received two Lifetime Achievement awards: the IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award in distributed computing systems, and the ESRI Award. Full
Professional Biography Dr. Smarr has long been a pioneer in the prototyping of a national information infrastructure to support academic research, governmental functions, and industrial competitiveness. In 1983 he initiated the first proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) recommending development of a national supercomputer center. This resulted in the creation of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1985, where he served as its Director until March, 2000. Under Dr. Smarr's leadership and vision, NCSA became a trailblazer in creating the modern information infrastructure. Dr. Smarr argued strongly for the construction of the first national NSF backbone, which connected the five NSF supercomputer centers in 1986, and rapidly evolved, first into the NSFnet, and then into today's commercial Internet. NCSA greatly broadened the participation in the rapidly growing Net by its creation and distribution of NCSA Telnet in 1985, the most popular way to log onto the internet for many years. In the later 1980s, NCSA brought computational scientists, artists, and computer scientists together to forge the new tool of scientific visualization, producing a series of videos with worldwide influence. NCSA then brought this "power to see" to the personal computer with NCSA Image and Datascope. At the beginning of the 1990s, NCSA Collage and later NCSA Habanero led the way toward synchronous collaboration, an Internet capability that will become widespread in the next decade. Finally, the development of NCSA Mosaic and NCSA's Web server software in 1993-4 transformed the Internet into the Web, directly leading to the commercial web browsers and servers universally used today. NCSA also pioneered the style of distributing software freely over the Internet, which has become the standard for the web market today. During this period, Dr. Smarr has worked very closely with industry to assure early adoption of these new technologies. NCSA's Industrial Partner program has, since the beginning of NCSA, closely coupled to leaders of the major categories of the economy such as JP Morgan, Motorola, Caterpillar, American Airlines, Eastman Kodak, Allstate Insurance, Sears, Boeing, Shell Oil, and Kellogg's. As a member of the CSC Vanguard Board, Dr. Smarr worked with Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Bob Lucky, John Perry Barlow, Gordon Bell, Peter Cochrane and other leading figures in the computer revolution to create five vision meetings a year for roughly 50 CIO-level leaders of industry. In his role as a member of the Fisher Scientific Science and Technology Council, Dr. Smarr helped Fisher review many of the new offerings from biotech startup companies and counseled Fisher on how to become one the earliest large catalog sites on the web. Finally, Dr. Smarr, in his role as Director of NCSA, analyzed future products with many of the leading companies creating today's information infrastructure such as SGI, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Compaq, Sun Microsystems, Intel, Microsoft, Ameritech, AT&T, Qwest, MCI, Cisco, and EMC. In October, 1997, Dr. Smarr became the Director of the National Computational Science Alliance, comprised of over fifty universities, government labs, and corporations linked with NCSA in a national-scale virtual enterprise to prototype the information infrastructure of the 21st Century. The widely used Access Grid, enabling multi-site video streaming and Condor high-throughput computing were two of the innovations that emerged from the Alliance partners at Argonne National Lab and the University of Wisconsin, respectively. In July 2000, Dr. Smarr moved to La Jolla, CA, where he became a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego. In December 2000, his successful proposal led to the creation of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego / UC Irvine partnership, where he serves as Institute Director. Calit2 creates a persistent "collaboration framework" coupling over 1200 researchers in the two Calit2 buildings at UCSD and UCI, including roughly 100 UCSD and UCI faculty in computer science and electrical engineering, another 100 faculty in applications, education, policy, or basic materials research, and more than 50 industrial partners carrying out research on the optical and wireless extensions of today's Internet. Smarr created the intellectual framework of the Calit2, including novel large-scale "Living Laboratories" which have been deployed to study how emerging distributed information technologies and telecommunications can improve California's future, including traffic congestion, earthquake monitoring, biomedical informatics, and the state water system. Dr. Smarr has also emphasized coupling of scientific applications researchers with those in the nano, bio, and info technologies to enhance the capabilities of the applications and the technologies. Smarr remains an active scientific researcher. He is the principle investigator of the NSF-funded OptIPuter (www.optiputer.net), which is rapidly establishing the optical backplane for planetary scale distributed computing. The OptIPuter technology is being applied to prototyping a new generation of fiber optic coupled ocean observatories in the NSF-funded LOOKING project on which he serves as co-PI. In 1988, Dr. Smarr had realized that the Internet would enable building distributed "virtual" computers by connecting different architectures of computers, large datasets, visualization devices, and scientific instruments to form what he termed "Metacomputers." Dr. Smarr was one of the small number of organizers of the first Grid conference, which led to the robust Global Grid Forum community of researchers today. He is generally credited with creating the name "Grid" for the middleware which enables distributed computing today. The OptIPuter extends the Grid program by adding the ability to find and connect dedicated optical network links to the traditional compute and storage components of the Grid. Throughout the last twenty years, Dr. Smarr has worked with a small group of colleagues to create next-generation networking demonstrations in conjunction with major conferences, which has been quite effective in accelerating the pace of development of distributed computing. This approach started with the Science by Satellite at Siggraph 89, went on to I-WAY at Supercomputing 95 and to iGRID2005 at Calit2. For instance the software which Ian Foster developed to support distributed computing at SC95, I-soft, became the Globus middleware which is now the standard Grid middleware. At iGrid2005, which Dr. Smarr hosted in September 2005, there were over 50 distributed computing demonstrations involving more than 20 countries, supported by 100 gigabit/sec optical circuits into the new Calit2@UCSD building. Dr. Smarr has been a national leader in working with the Federal Government to influence the evolution of the distributed and parallel computing. Dr. Smarr has participated on many influential federal committees, such as the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), the NIH Working Group on Biomedical Computing (on which he served as co-chair), the Advisory Committees to the Director of the NIH, the NASA Advisory Council, he served as Chair, NASA Earth System Science & Applications Advisory Committee, and he served on two of the NRC Commissions. He has been deeply involved in writing a long series of key national reports which drove federal funding for distributed computing. These range from the "Report of the NSF Subcommittee on Computational Facilities for Theoretical Research to the Advisory Committee for Physics (Press Report) in 1980, to the "Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation's Information Infrastructure" (Brooks-Sutherland NRC Report in 1995), to the PITAC report "Information Technology Research: Investing in Our Future," in 1999. Dr. Smarr has advised major journals and public television about the transforming nature of distributed computing. He was on the editorial board of Science from 1986-1990. He is currently one of four science advisors to the Lehrer NewsHour. Dr. Smarr has also been tireless in educating government agencies, university administrators, science, engineering, medical, humanities, and arts faculty and professional societies. His views have been quoted in Science, Nature, the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, EDUCAUSE, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Business Week, Red Herring, Wired, and Boing Boing and he gives frequent keynote addresses at professional conferences and to popular audiences. Dr. Smarr conducted observational, theoretical, and computational based research in relativistic astrophysics for fifteen years before he became Director of NCSA. He was the founder of the field of numerical general relativity and made major contributions to computational high energy astrophysics (supernovae, neutron stars, blackholes, relativistic magnetohydrodynamics, and galactic jet dynamics). Smarr is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1990 he received the Franklin Institute's Delmer S. Fahrney Medal for Leadership in Science or Technology. He has co-authored with William Kaufmann III, the book, Supercomputing and the Transformation of Science (ISSN 1040-3213).
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