Larry Smarr

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Larry Smarr is a physicist and leader in scientific computing, supercomputer applications, and Internet infrastructure.

He received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975, did research at Princeton University, Yale, and Harvard, and then joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1979. He is presently a Professor of Computer Science and Information Technologies at the University of California, San Diego.

In 1985, Smarr founded and became the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC, one of the National Science Foundation's flagship supercomputing centers. He argued for the creation of a high-speed network linking the national centers, which became the NSFnet, predecessor to today's Internet. When the NSF revised its funding of supercomputer centers in 1997, Smarr became director of the National Computational Science Alliance, linking dozens of universities and research labs with NCSA to prototype the concept of grid computing.

In 2000, Smarr moved to California and proposed the creation of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), linking departments and researchers at UCSD and UC Irvine. Smarr currently serves as Institute Director of Calit2. As part of the work of Calit2, he is Principal Investigator on the NSF OptIPuter LambdaGrid project, an "optical backplane for planetary scale distributed computing".

[edit] Recognition

Smarr has received numerous honors and awards, including:

Member of the National Academy of Engineering
Fellow of the American Physical Society
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Franklin Institute's Delmer S. Fahrney Medal for Leadership in Science or Technology (1990)

In 2005, Smarr was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado.

[edit] Publications

A few of Smarr's publications are:

William J. Kaufmann III, Larry L. Smarr. Supercomputing and the Transformation of Science, Scientific American Library, W. H. Freeman and Company, 1993. ISBN 0-7167-5038-4.
"Grids in Context" in The Grid: A Blueprint for the New Computing Infrastructure, 2nd Edition, Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, eds., Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.
Members of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee. Information Technology Research: Investing in Our Future, a Report to the President of the United States, 1999.
"Extraterrestrial Computing: Exploring the Universe with a Supercomputer". Chapter 8 of Very large Scale Computation in the 21st Century, Jill P. Mesirov, ed., Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), 1991.
Charlie Catlett, Larry Smarr. "Metacomputing", Communications of the ACM, vol. 35, no. 6, June 1992.
Larry Smarr. "How Supercomputers are Transforming Science," Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbook, 1991.