Computing pioneer to speak

In addition to many of the Lab’s own top scientists’ presentations, Science Day will host Larry Smarr as its plenary speaker.

Smarr’s talk, "From the Supercomputer to the Grid," will be held at 9 a.m. in the Bldg. 123 auditorium, along with the other Science Day presentations. (See http://stars.llnl.gov/ScienceDay/agenda.html ).

Larry Smarr is a pioneer in prototyping a national information infrastructure to support academic research, governmental functions,and industrial competitiveness. In 1985, he became the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

In 1997, he became the founding director of the National Computational Science Alliance, comprised of over 50 universities, government labs and corporations linked with NCSA in a national-scale virtual enterprise to prototype the information infrastructure of the twenty-first century.

Most recently, Smarr became the founding director of the Calif-ornia Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, which spans the Universities of California at San Diego and Irvine.

Smarr received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and conducted observational, theoretical and computational based astrophysical sciences research for fifteen years before becoming director of NCSA. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1990 he received the Franklin Institute’s Delmer S. Fahrney Gold Medal for Leadership in Science or Technology. Smarr is a member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee.