Abstract: Research in data-intensive fields is increasingly multi-investigator and multi-institutional, depending on ever more rapid access to ultra-large heterogeneous and widely distributed datasets, which in turn is demanding new technological solutions in visualization, machine learning, and high-performance cyberinfrastructure. I will describe how my NSF-funded Pacific Research Platform (PRP), which provides an Internet platform with 100-1000 times the bandwidth of today's commodity Internet to all the research universities on the West Coast, is being designed from the application needs of researchers. The disciplines which are engaged in partnering with the PRP range from particle physics to climate to human health, as well as archaeology, digital libraries, and social media analysis. The next stage, well underway, is understanding how to scale this prototype cyberinfrastructure to a National and Global Research Platform.
Larry Smarr is the
founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership, and holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School. Before that, he was Professor of Physics and Astronomy and the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as 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 and in 2014 the Golden Goose Award. He served on the NASA Advisory Council to 4 NASA Administrators, was chair of the NASA Information Technology Infrastructure Committee and the NSF Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, and for 8 years he was a member of the NIH Advisory Committee to the NIH Director, serving 3 directors. He is currently the Principal Investigator on the NSF Pacific Research Platform grants.
Smarr Subject of Feature Story on Personalizing Surgery
in March Edition of The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/larry-smarr-the-man-who-saw-inside-himself/550883/
