Who We Are
Larry Smarr
Founding Director, Calit2
Larry Smarr became founding director in 2000 of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a University of California San Diego/UC Irvine partnership. He holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in the Jacobs School’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD.
For the previous 15 years as founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Smarr helped drive major developments in the planetary information infrastructure: the Internet, the web, scientific visualization, virtual reality, and global telepresence. Smarr serves as PI on the NSF’s OptIPuter and the Moore Foundation’s CAMERA projects. Smarr was a member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee for President Clinton and served until 2005 on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and the NASA Advisory Council.
Smarr 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 2006 he received the IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award for his lifetime achievements in distributed computing systems.