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Jack Baskin School of EngineeringUC Santa Cruz

Larry Smarr
Director, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information UC San Diego

How Global-Scale Personal Lightwaves are Transforming Scientific Research

Thursday, March 22, 2007
2:00 PM
Engineering 2 Building, room 180

Announcement:
Distinguished Lecture - Jack Baskin School of Engineering Tenth Anniversary Celebration

Abstract:
During the last few years, a radical restructuring of optical networks supporting e-Science projects is beginning to occur around the world. U.S. universities are beginning to acquire access to high bandwidth lightwaves(termed "lambdas") on fiber optics through the National LambdaRail and the Global Lambda Integrated Facility. These user controlled 1- or 10- Gbps lambdas are providing direct access to global data repositories, scientific instruments, and computational resources from the researcher's Linux clusters in their campus laboratories. These dedicated connections have a number of significant advantages over shared internet connections, including high bandwidth, controlled performance (no jitter), lower cost per unit bandwidth, and security. These lambdas enable the Grid program to be completed, in that they add the network elements to the compute and storage elements which can be discovered, reserved, and integrated by the Grid middleware to form global LambdaGrids. I will describe how LambdaGrids enable new capabilities in medical imaging, earth sciences, interactive ocean observatories, and marine microbial metagenomics.

Biography:
Larry Smarr is 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. During his career, he has pursued basic research in a wide variety of fields, first in general relativity, then computational and observational astronomy, now in the computer science and electrical engineering of large-scale optical networks. Smarr is Principal Investigator on the NSF OptIPuter LambdaGrid project, the Moore Foundation CAMERA marine microbial metagenomics project, and is Co-PI on the NSF 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, Wired, Fortune, and Business Week, and he gives frequent keynote addresses at professional conferences and to popular audiences. He 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. He is currently a member of the federal government's Networking and Information Technology Advisory Group which provides input and feedback to the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He was named a member of the California Governor's Task Force on Broadband in December 2006. He serves as a science advisor to InterWest Partners and the Lehrer News Hour. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is 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. In 2006 he was presented with the ESRI Lifetime Achievement Award and received the IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award for distributed computing systems achievements. He is a USC Annenberg Fellow and a Crick-Jacobs Senior Fellow at La Jolla's Salk Institute.

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