Larry Smarr | |
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Born | Larry Lee Smarr October 16, 1948 |
Education | University of Missouri (BA, MS) University of Texas at Austin (PhD) |
Known for | Quantified Self [1] [2] Metacomputing [3] |
Awards | Member of the National Academy of Engineering Fellow of the American Physical Society Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Delmer S. Fahrney Medal (1990) Golden Goose Award (2014) |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Princeton University Yale University Harvard University University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University of California, San Diego. |
Thesis | The Structure of General Relativity with a Numerical Illustration: The Collision of Two Black Holes (1975) |
Website | lsmarr |
Larry Lee Smarr is a physicist and leader in scientific computing, supercomputer applications, and Internet infrastructure from Missouri. [4] He currently works at the University of California, San Diego. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] 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. [16] 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 that created the modern Internet. For nearly 20 years, he has been building a new model for academic research based on interdisciplinary collaboration.
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.
After graduating, Smarr did research at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard, [17] [18] 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, Larry 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. [19] 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, Larry 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 served as Institute Director of Calit2 from its founding until his retirement in 2020.
As part of the work of Calit2, he is Principal Investigator on the NSF OptIPuter [20] LambdaGrid project, an "optical backplane for planetary scale distributed computing" and the CAMERA Project, [21] a high-performance computing resource for genomic research. [22] [23]
He attended the Beyond Belief symposium in November 2006[ citation needed ] and presented at the 2010 and 2012 Life Extension Conferences. [24]
Since 2012, Larry Smarr has been engaged in a computer-aided study of his own body. [1] [2] [25] [26]
Larry Smarr has received numerous honors and awards, including:
The USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a component of the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering, and specializes in research and development in information processing, computing, and communications technologies. It is located in Marina del Rey, California.
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale computer infrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, business and industry partners, and other federal agencies.
The National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was a program of coordinated, evolving projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1985 to 1995 to promote advanced research and education networking in the United States. The program created several nationwide backbone computer networks in support of these initiatives. Initially created to link researchers to the NSF-funded supercomputing centers, through further public funding and private industry partnerships it developed into a major part of the Internet backbone.
The Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC), housed at Frank H. T. Rhodes Hall on the campus of Cornell University, is one of five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program. It was formerly called the Cornell Theory Center.
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United States federal research funders use the term cyberinfrastructure to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over the Internet beyond the scope of a single institution. In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological and sociological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.
TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011.
Charlie Catlett is a senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a visiting senior fellow at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago. From 2020 to 2022 he was a senior research scientist at the University of Illinois Discovery Partners Institute. He was previously a senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a senior fellow in the Computation Institute, a joint institute of Argonne National Laboratory and The University of Chicago, and a senior fellow at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy.
Thomas Albert "Tom" DeFanti is an American computer graphics researcher and pioneer. His work has ranged from early computer animation, to scientific visualization, virtual reality, and grid computing. He is a distinguished professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a research scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).
Metacomputing is all computing and computing-oriented activity which involves computing knowledge utilized for the research, development and application of different types of computing. It may also deal with numerous types of computing applications, such as: industry, business, management and human-related management. New emerging fields of metacomputing focus on the methodological and technological aspects of the development of large computer networks/grids, such as the Internet, intranet and other territorially distributed computer networks for special purposes.
David J. Kuck, a graduate of the University of Michigan, was a professor in the Computer Science Department the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1965 to 1993. He is the father of Olympic silver medalist Jonathan Kuck. While at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign he developed the Parafrase compiler system (1977), which was the first testbed for the development of automatic vectorization and related program transformations. In his role as Director (1986–93) of the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development (CSRD-UIUC), Kuck led the construction of the CEDAR project, a hierarchical shared-memory 32-processor SMP supercomputer completed in 1988 at the University of Illinois.
Edward Seidel is an American academic administrator and scientist serving as the president of the University of Wyoming since July 1, 2020. He previously served as the Vice President for Economic Development and Innovation for the University of Illinois System, as well as a Founder Professor in the Department of Physics and a professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois from 2014 to 2017.
Maxine D. Brown is an American computer scientist and retired director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Along with Tom DeFanti and Bruce McCormick, she co-edited the 1987 NSF report, Visualization in Scientific Computing, which defined the field of scientific visualization.
Mateo Valero Cortés is a Spanish computer architect. His research encompasses different concepts within the field of computer architecture, a discipline in which he has published more than 700 papers in journals, conference proceedings and books. Valero has received numerous awards, including the Eckert–Mauchly Award in 2007, for "extraordinary leadership in building a world class computer architecture research center, for seminal contributions in the areas of vector computing and multithreading, and for pioneering basic new approaches to instruction-level parallelism." He is the director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which hosts the MareNostrum supercomputer.
Francine Berman is an American computer scientist, and a leader in digital data preservation and cyber-infrastructure. In 2009, she was the inaugural recipient of the IEEE/ACM-CS Ken Kennedy Award "for her influential leadership in the design, development and deployment of national-scale cyberinfrastructure, her inspiring work as a teacher and mentor, and her exemplary service to the high performance community". In 2004, Business Week called her the "reigning teraflop queen".
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The University of Illinois Department of Computer Science is the academic department encompassing the discipline of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. According to U.S. News & World Report, both its undergraduate and graduate programs rank in the top five among American universities, and according to Computer Science Open Rankings, the department ranks equally high in placing Ph.D. students in tenure-track positions at top universities and winning best paper awards. The department also ranks in the top two among all universities for faculty submissions to reputable journals and academic conferences, as determined by CSRankings.org. From before its official founding in 1964 to today, the department's faculty members and alumni have contributed to projects including the ORDVAC, PLATO, Mosaic, JavaScript and LLVM, and have founded companies including Siebel Systems, Netscape, Mozilla, PayPal, Yelp, YouTube, and Malwarebytes.
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