Celebrating the visionary whose persistent inspired service to CENIC has made it better for everyone in countless ways

The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) is proud to honor Professor Larry Smarr with its 2026 Christine Haska Award for Distinguished Service.

CENIC and its members have benefitted from Professor Smarr’s insight, intuition, and brilliant innovation since he landed in California twenty-five years ago, bringing his experience and knowledge as founder of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Illinois with him. While he was director, NCSA launched the first successful visual web browser, NCSA Mosaic, which led to Internet Explorer, Netscape, and inspired all the other web-based applications we use today. Smarr also convinced the US Federal Agencies and major carriers to interoperate their networks, co-leading the team that constructed the first such successful major demonstration in San Diego at Supercomputing’s SC95 conference.

Five years later, Larry became the founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego-UC Irvine partnership, which over the next 20 years built the testbeds that became the National Research Platform and the CENIC AI Resource (CENIC AIR). Larry’s ability to not only foresee, but fully use, test, monitor, and measure science that is made possible by a high-capacity computer network linking the considerable assets of California’s research and education institutions has been transformational. He conceived of the Pacific Research Platform (PRP), supported by a rare meeting of all the UC Chief Information Officers and Vice Chancellors for Research, who endorsed the PRP’s linking of UC’s campus researchers, faculty, and students.

Succeeding in that, Larry and his technical team broadened the PRP membership to include many of the California State Universities and the first of the California Community Colleges, sharing this leading-edge AI technology with all of CENIC’s higher education community. The annual National Research Platform (NRP) conferences launched by the PRP in 2017 enabled the PRP to go nationwide and global, thereby creating a shared networked computational and data storage infrastructure for the research and education community.

The CENIC community is indebted to Larry, who brought his technical and leadership experience to the CENIC Board of Directors in 2001, and he has continued to contribute to CENIC as a researcher and advocate, setting goals that made CENIC’s current enviable networking capacity and reach in California possible. His earliest efforts on the CENIC Board led to the significant acquisition of dark fiber, laying the foundation for much of the innovation that followed. “Bandwidth should never be the bottleneck to research and education,” he said, which enabled CENIC to be the backbone of his NSF-funded OptIPuter, demonstrating that the wide-area bandwidth could be as fast as the backplane of a cluster, essentially eliminating distance for collaborative big-data scientific research. Larry and his team subsequently used a series of NSF grant-funded projects to actively involve many CENIC member universities’ research faculty, students, and IT staff.

Ten years ago, Larry anticipated the potential of connecting environmental sensors to allow real-time monitoring of climate impacts. He imagined CENIC as a sort of technical reservoir of expertise to inform communities how to make that information useful. Today CENIC has launched a testbed of monitoring activity in agricultural communities, building on the success with the San Diego-based WIFIRE project he helped prototype.

CENIC looks forward to Larry’s continuing contributions as the first Science Advisor to the CENIC Board, and the broad CENIC community is grateful for his many years of inspired leadership.

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