PROFESSOR LARRY SMARR

Harry E. Gruber Professor of Computer Science and Engineering

University of California, San Diego

Larry Smarr is the founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and Harry E. Gruber professor in the Jacobs School's Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD. Smarr is Principal Investigator on the NSF OptIPuter LambdaGrid project and is Co-Pl on the NSP LOOKING ocean observatory prototype.

As founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the National Computational Science Alliance Smarr has driven major contributions to the development of the national information infrastructure: the Internet, the Web, the emerging Grid, collaboratories, and scientific visualization. His views have been quoted in Science, Nature, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, and Business Week, and he gives frequent keynote addresses at professional conferences and to popular audiences.

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 and Technology.

2008 LEADERSHIP DIALOGUE SCHOLAR

COUPLING AUSTRALIA’S RESEARCHERS TO THE GLOBAL INNOVATION ECONOMY
Professor Larry Smarr

An innovation economy begins with the “pull toward the future” provided by a robust public research sector. While the shared Internet has been rapidly diminishing Australia’s “tyranny of distance,” the 21st century global competition, driven by public research innovation, requires Australia to have high performance connectivity second to none for its researchers.

A major step toward this goal has been achieved during the last year through theAustralian American Leadership Dialogue (AALD) Project Link, establishing a 1 Gigabit/sec dedicated end-to-end connection between a 100 megapixel OptiPortal at the University of Melbourne and Calit2 at University of California, San Diego over AARNet, Australia's National Research and Education Network.

From October 2-17 ’08 Larry Smarr, as the 2008 Leadership Dialogue Scholar, visited Australian universities across the country to oversee the second phase of the Leadership Dialogue's Project Link - the linking of Australia’s major research intensive universities and the CSIRO to each other and to innovation centres around the world with AARNet's new 10 Gbps access product.

With this unprecedented bandwidth, Australia will be able to join emerging global collaborative research—across disciplines as diverse as climate change, coral reefs, bush fires, biotechnology, and health care—bringing the best minds on the planet together on issues critical to our future.