Dr. Smarr has long been a pioneer in
the prototyping of a national information infrastructure to support
academic research, governmental functions, and industrial competitiveness.
- In 1983 he initiated the first proposal to the National
Science Foundation (NSF) recommending development of a national
supercomputer center. This resulted in the creation of the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1985, where he served
as its Director until March, 2000.
- For the last fifteen years, under Dr. Smarr's leadership
and vision, NCSA has been a trailblazer in creating the modern
information infrastructure. Dr. Smarr argued strongly for the
construction of the first national NSF backbone, which connected
the five NSF supercomputer centers in 1986, and rapidly evolved,
first into the NSFnet, and then into today's commercial Internet.
NCSA greatly broadened the participation in the rapidly growing
Net by its creation and distribution of NCSA Telnet in 1985, the
most popular way to log onto the internet for many years. A decade
ago NCSA brought computational scientists, artists, and computer
scientists together to forge the new tool of scientific visualization,
producing a series of videos with worldwide influence. NCSA then
brought this "power to see" to the personal computer
with NCSA Image and Datascope. At the beginning of the 1990s,
NCSA Collage and later NCSA Habanero led the way toward synchronous
collaboration, an Internet capability that will become widespread
early in the next century. Finally, the development of NCSA Mosaic
and NCSA's Web server software transformed the Internet into the
Web, directly leading to the commercial web browsers and servers
universally used today. NCSA also pioneered the style of distributing
software freely over the Internet, which has become the standard
for the web market today.
- During this period, Dr. Smarr has worked very closely
with industry to assure early adoption of these new technologies.
NCSA's Industrial Partner program has, since the beginning of
NCSA, closely coupled to leaders of the major categories of the
economy such as JP Morgan, Motorola, Caterpillar, American Airlines,
Eastman Kodak, Allstate Insurance, Sears, Boeing, Shell Oil, and
Kellogg's. As a member of the CSC Vanguard Board, Dr. Smarr worked
with Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Bob Lucky, John Perry Barlow,
Gordon Bell, Peter Cochrane and other leading figures in the computer
revolution to create five vision meetings a year for roughly 50
CIO-level leaders of industry. In his role as a member of the
Fisher Scientific Science and Technology Council, Dr. Smarr helped
Fisher review many of the new offerings from biotech startup companies
and counseled Fisher on how to become one the earliest large catalog
sites on the web. Finally, Dr. Smarr, in his role as Director
of NCSA, analyzed future products with many of the leading companies
creating today's information infrastructure such as SGI, Hewlett-Packard,
IBM, Compaq, Sun Microsystems, Intel, Microsoft, Ameritech, AT&T,
Qwest, MCI, Cisco, and EMC.
- In October, 1997, Dr. Smarr became the Director of
the National Computational Science Alliance, comprised of over
fifty universities, government labs, and corporations linked with
NCSA in a national-scale virtual enterprise to prototype the information
infrastructure of the 21st Century. In July 2000, Dr. Smarr moved
to La Jolla, CA, where he became a Professor of Computer Science
and Engineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University
of California San Diego. In December, his successful proposal
led to the creation of the California Institute for Telecommunications
and Information Technology, where he serves as Institute Director.
He continues to be an active member of a number of high-level
government committees such as the President's Information Technology
Advisory Committee and the Advisory Committee to the Director,
NIH.
- Dr. Smarr is a tireless speaker championing the notion
of the revolutionary nature of the Information Age. His views
on the Internet, supercomputers, and computational science have
been quoted widely in publications including the New York Times,
Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Business Week, Science,
and Nature. In November 1998 he was the subject of the Red Herring
Profile.
- He then conducted postdoctoral research at Princeton,
Yale, and Cambridge universities. For the three years before he
joined the University of Illinois faculty in 1979, Smarr was a
Junior Fellow in the Harvard University Society of Fellows. An
internationally recognized astrophysicist, Dr. Smarr has conducted
observational, theoretical, and computational based research in
relativistic astrophysics for fifteen years before he became Director
of NCSA.
- Smarr is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering,
and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1990 he received the Franklin
Institute's Delmer S. Fahrney Medal for Leadership in Science
or Technology. He has co-authored with William Kaufmann III, the
book, Supercomputing and the Transformation of Science (ISSN 1040-3213).
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