Larry Smarr
American physicist (born 1948)
Larry Lee Smarr is a physicist and leading pioneer in scientific computing, supercomputer applications, and Internet infrastructure. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, and was the founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, as well as the Harry E. Gruber Endowed Chair of Computer Science and Information Technologies at the Jacobs School of Engineering.
Smarr has been among the most important synthesizers and conductors of innovation, discovery, and commercialization of new technologies–including areas as disparate as the Web browser and personalized medicine. In his career, Smarr has made pioneering breakthroughs in research on black holes, spearheaded the use of supercomputers for academic research, and presided over some of the major innovations which created the modern Internet, including overseeing the development of NCSA Telnet, NCSA Mosaic, and NCSA HTTPd, while he was the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, one of the five first national supercomputing centers in the United States. For nearly 20 years, he has been building a new model for academic research based on interdisciplinary collaboration.
Education
Larry Smarr received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Science degrees from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, and received a PhD in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975.
Research
After graduating, Smarr performed research at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. Then joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1979. He is a professor of Computer Science and Information Technologies at the University of California, San Diego.
While at Illinois, Smarr wrote an ambitious proposal to address the future needs of scientific research.
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This entry incorporates text from “Larry Smarr” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.