NCSA NEWS

Smarr Appointed to Scientific Advisory Board

released July 21, 2000

Entropia, Inc. named Dr. Larry Smarr chairman of its Scientific Advisory Board. Smarr is the founding director of both the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the National Computational Science Alliance. These organizations have created major innovations in both the Internet and large scale computing, including the first graphical Web browser NCSA Mosaic, the most popular Web server httpd (now Apache), scientific visualization, bioinformatics and scalable parallel computing. Smarr is now focusing on the next major transition, Internet computing.

"Entropia will enable a profound change in the nature of computing and the Internet," said Dr. Smarr. "We are at a major discontinuity in the evolution of high-performance computing. Currently, the largest scale computing systems have thousands of processors. Entropia's approach will create megacomputer systems with millions of processors. Entropia's Internet computing model will accelerate the rate of academic scientific progress and enable the private sector to become more competitive."

Dr. Smarr's proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) led to the creation of the NCSA in 1985, where he served as director until March 2000. NCSA earned and maintains an international reputation for pioneering early access to high-performance computing architectures, most recently in 1998 by creating the tightly coupled NT Supercluster, designed by then UIUC computer scientist and now chief technology officer and co-founder of Entropia, Inc., Dr. Andrew Chien. In 1997, Smarr organized the National Computational Science Alliance, comprised of over 50 universities, government labs and corporations linked with NCSA in a national-scale virtual enterprise to prototype the information infrastructure of the 21st Century.

"Larry has been a key figure in the development of a remarkable number of world-changing technologies for computing and the Internet," said Chien. "Larry's leadership and vision will be invaluable in shaping both the Internet computing industry and Entropia's place in it."

Dr. Smarr serves on President Clinton's Information Technology Advisory Committee and the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. On July 1, Dr. Smarr became a professor in the UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Director Designate of the proposed California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technologies.

Entropia, Inc., is creating the world's largest Internet computing services by converting the idle time of PCs into large-scale computer power via the Internet. By downloading Entropia software from the company's Web site, individuals can contribute their computers' otherwise wasted processor time to important projects that significantly speed progress and production in the medical, scientific, research, finance and entertainment industries. Entropia is a privately held company headquartered in San Diego, Calif. For additional information, visit http://www.entropia.com/.

 

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