Larry Smarr is a physicist and leader in scientific computing, supercomputer applications, and Internet infrastructure. A physicist is a scientist trained in physics. ... Scientific computing (or Computational science) is the field of study concerned with constructing mathematical models and numerical solution techniques and using computers to analyze and solve scientific and engineering problems. ... A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. ...

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. The University of Texas at Austin, often called UT or Texas, is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. ... Princeton University is a coeducational private university located on an extensive campus in and around suburban Princeton, New Jersey. ... Yale redirects here. ... Harvard University campus (old map) Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ... The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, also known as UIUC and the U of I (the officially preferred abbreviation), is the flagship campus in the University of Illinois system. ... The University of California, San Diego (popularly known as UCSD) is a public, coeducational university located in La Jolla, California. ...

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. The Beckman Institute, current Headquarters of the NCSA The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is one of the five original centers in the National Science Foundations Supercomputer Centers Program and a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ... The logo of the National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. ... National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) was a major part of early 1990s Internet backbone. ... This article or section may contain external links added only to promote a website, product, or service – otherwise known as spam. ...

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". The University of California, Irvine is a public university situated in suburban Irvine, California. ...

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)

The American Physical Society was founded in 1899 and is the worlds second largest organization of physicists. ... The House of the Academy, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ... The Franklin Institute is the memorial to Benjamin Franklin, that serves to perpetuate his legacy; the museum contains many of Franklins personal effects. ...

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.

For the country formerly called Siam see Thailand SIAM is an acronym for Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. ... Charlie Catlett is currently a Senior Fellow in the Computation Institute at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, and Director of the TeraGrid Project. ...

External links

Smarr's personal home page