INTERCONNECTS
Founding NCSA director Larry Smarr to speak May 4
The next speaker in the NCSA 20th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture Series will be Larry Smarr, the center's founding director. Currently director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, Smarr will speak at 7 p.m. on May 4 in the NCSA Auditorium (1205 W. Clark St., U.) on "High-Performance Collaboration: The Jump to Light Speed." NCSA has been a leader in new modes of networked collaboration for more than 15 years. The 1989 "Science by Satellite" demonstration at an international computer visualization conference painted a vision of distance being eliminated by network and computing technology. That vision is finally nearing reality. With the emergence of dedicated 10-gigabit-per-second optical backplanes on a planetary scale, the notion of shared telepresence is becoming achievable. Smarr will review highlights of NCSA's pioneering work. He will then describe some recent experiments at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.