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 UCSD's Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Before that, he was the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC. He is currently the principal investigator on the NSF Pacific Research Platform and Cognitive Hardware and Software Ecosystem Community Infrastructure grants. His views have been quoted in Science, Nature, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Wired, Fortune, Business Week, the Atlantic Magazine, and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Larry is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 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 four NASA administrators, was chair of the NASA Information Technology Infrastructure Committee and the NSF Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, and for eight years was a member of the NIH Advisory Committee to the NIH Director, serving three directors. He is currently a member of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory advisory board and of the SNS Future in Review (FiRe) advisory board. Calit2 operates as the FiRe Lab.

Larry's personal interests include orchids and coral reefs, quantifying the state of his body, and researching the details of the global energy system and the global climatic disruption it is causing.