Larry Smarr

Professor Larry Lee Smarr is a physicist and leader in scientific computing, supercomputer applications, and Internet infrastructure at the University of California, San Diego.

Smarr received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Science degrees from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri and received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975.

After graduating, Smarr did research at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard, and 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. Seven other University of Illinois professors joined as co-Principal Investigators, and many others provided descriptions of what could be accomplished if the proposal were accepted. Formally titled A Center for Scientific and Engineering Supercomputing but known as the Black Proposal (after the color of its cover), it was submitted to the National Science Foundation in 1983. A scant 10 pages long, it was the first unsolicited proposal accepted and approved by the NSF, and resulted in the charter of four supercomputer centers (Cornell, Illinois, Princeton, and San Diego), with a fifth (Pittsburgh) added later. In 1985 Smarr became the first director of the Illinois center, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Smarr continued to promote the benefits of technological innovation to scientific research, such as his advocacy of a high-speed network linking the national centers, which became the NSFnet, one of the significant predecessors of 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 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" and the CAMERA Project, a high-performance computing resource for genomic research.

He attended the Beyond Belief symposium on November 2006 and presented at the 2010 and 2012 Life Extension Conferences.

As of 2012, Larry Smarr is engaged in a computer-aided study of his own body.

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)
• Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology (2005)
• Golden Goose Award for his work involving black holes and supercomputering. (2014)
• Member of the San Diego Science Festival's Nifty Fifty, a collection of the most influential scientists in the San Diego area.

• "Black Holes and Supercomputing". The Golden Goose Award. Retrieved 2015-05-27. 
• http://www.sdsciencefestival.org
• "San Diego Science Festival Nifty Fifty". San Diego Science Festival. Retrieved 2009-02-18.