Tech moguls such as Larry Ellison and Bill Gates are adept at grabbing headlines and beating competitors. Larry Smarr is another kind of technology leader, the academic who quietly labors for years building the telecommunications infrastructure on which those leaders of Oracle and Microsoft depend.

Because the future is a tricky beast, the labor of people like Smarr is best known in retrospect. So it’s not surprising that Smarr’s acceptance of a professorship at the University of California, San Diego last April — he officially joined July 1 — drew little attention. Only slightly more publicity greeted the announcement in late 2000 that Smarr was taking the directorship of the new $300 million ($100 million from the state and $200 million from private companies) California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, a joint effort of UCSD and the University of California, Irvine.

Robert Conn, dean of UCSD’s School of Engineering, began recruiting Smarr in the summer of 1999. Smarr’s stellar record in information technology made him an attractive recruiting target as a faculty member, Conn says, and even more so shortly thereafter, when the university decided to propose the institute known now as Cal (IT)2.

“Larry Smarr is an internationally renowned person in computer science, and in addition a very well known physicist,” Conn says. “One of the ways you keep a great school of engineering great is you bring great people to it .... This opportunity very much attracted Larry, namely the prospect of being able to look out to the future in a different way, and then help to bring it about.”

Conn notes that when Smarr decided to accept the UCSD post, he automatically became the strongest candidate for director of the institute, if it got funded. Moreover, Smarr’s availability to be director strengthened the chances that UCSD’s proposal for the institute would be accepted against competing proposals. So while Smarr’s coming to UCSD was technically separate from the decision to choose him as institute director, the two in practice were closely related.

If Smarr does for San Diego what he did for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications — the effort here already involves 220 faculty members and 43 partner companies — the region’s research and commercial sector is in for a wild ride.

As NCSA director, Smarr led National Science Foundation supercomputing centers, including San Diego’s, into the networked Internet age. In 1986, NSF connected the five supercomputing centers. The network became known as NSFnet, which turned into today’s Internet. Later, NCSA focused on bringing the power of networks to personal computers.

Smarr gave some of the world’s best business advice several years ago to a student named Marc Andreessen, who had helped develop a better way to view Internet information. Instead of typing in clunky command lines, people could point and click their way around the Net. Smarr told Andreessen he should form a company around the concept, taking it out of the university.

That company, known first as Mosaic Communications and later as Netscape, helped turn the Internet from a tool for geeks and academics into a mass medium for businesses and individuals who wouldn’t know a Unix command from a bar code.

His arrival is being heralded by the technology industry’s leaders. That reaction in itself — his being singled out — says much in a region already rife with top R&D minds at places like Motorola, Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson, The Neurosciences Institute, Syngenta and others too numerous to name. Not to mention that Intel just bought a 31-acre campus for a 4,000 R&D employee operation and Texas Instruments a building in Sorrento Mesa to do the same.

“Larry Smarr has an impeccable pedigree — the Web browser was invented in his lab,” says Marco Thompson, president of the San Diego Telecom Council. “More important is his vision for the future of telecom. He’s not just a thinker about technology, but he takes a leadership role in understanding the social and regulatory issues that are going to come out of technology.”

“I think (Smarr’s work in San Diego) contributes one more golden peg to San Diego’s position in the telecommunications industry,” says Tyler Orion, vice chairwoman of the San Diego Regional Technology Alliance. “For someone of his caliber to come to San Diego is a very, very important validation of this community as a hub for the new industries. Also, this statewide initiative and its funding puts teeth into our ability to launch new ventures.”

In Smarr’s view, the next communication revolution will be a synthesis of technologies to make high-speed Internet access truly ubiquitous and easy to use. Southern California and San Diego in particular, with its strong research activities in areas such as wireless, proved an irresistible lure with its futuristic orientation.

As director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technologies, Smarr’s job is to bring telecommunications and computing to its next logical step of evolution. That means making networks function more efficiently in combination with distributed computing systems.

A look around his modest office in the Jacobs School of Engineering shows how comfortable he is with technology. A large, flat plasma screen and swiveling camera sit against one wall, opposite his desk, for conference calls. He has two laser printers — one color, one black and white — a sheet fed scanner, two flat screen monitors, a cable with a network card for his laptop and the laptop.

From his pocket Smarr pulls a wireless-enabled Palm 7 personal digital assistant — he owns several Palms — and the requisite tiny cell telephone. He uses all the devices and personally can, and does, create multimedia Power Point presentations that rival what a marketing shop would produce.

Just as all of his devices can work together, Smarr envisions a time when instead of working just with huge computers located in one place, businesses and researchers will harness the collective brainpower of many computers across the country and world. To do this, of course, high-speed communication is essential, which requires a different way of looking at the computing world than mainframes and PCs.

“We’re at the end of 20 years of the PC sector,” Smarr says. “A lot of places got to where they are on the basis of that. But the future is really this new Internet of wireless connectivity, of bringing broadband to the home, of photonics, and I saw the business sector here as being very much focused on that. So it seemed to me that it wasn’t just a private sector, but a private sector focused on the technologies of the future.”

Smarr says this communications future is part of “three great rivers” of technologies that are converging. They are telecom and information technology, biotechnology and bioinformatics, and nanotechnology.

“I see all three of those very strong here,” Smarr says.

Nanotechnology, for example, already is getting a lot of research attention, and extensive nanofabrication facilities are planned for UCSD.

“We’re going to be turning out a lot of students; there’s going to be a lot of faculty available to consult. And you already have a number of start-ups, Nanogen for instance. What I’m talking about is bringing together biology and physics and chemistry and engineering in this 100 nanometer by 100 nanometer scale. I think this is an area where you’re going to see a huge number of companies created over the next 10 to 20 years, and you have to have the intellectual basis for it.”

Nanogen provides a good example of this convergence, Smarr adds. The La Jolla company’s DNA sensing chips are produced by ultra-small fabrication techniques (nanotechnology), but its information is derived from human genetic variations (biotechnology) correlated with disease states through powerful databases (bioinformatics and information technology).

Looking up the coast, Smarr foresees collaboration with UCLA and UC at Santa Barbara on nanotechnology, binding together a “high-tech coast from Santa Barbara to Tijuana.”

Tech Power To The People

Lest people think this technology infrastructure is only for the techno-elite, Smarr says UCSD is committed to bringing the benefits of new information technologies to as many people as possible. For example, pollution and traffic problems could be alleviated by using remote sensing technology.

“Over the next 20 years, this region will see vast changes, for the better or for the worse,” Smarr says. “There are a whole new set of technologies emerging out of the wireless Internet that are going to be used by parts of the world to avoid the downside of growth. Why shouldn’t San Diego County be seen as the world leader in applying the technology its own companies are making on these tough social issues? It’s an attitude thing. Do we just want the companies to make money and jobs, or have the socio-political administration use the technologies (for the region’s benefit)?”

Smarr points to the dystopian pressure cooker of Silicon Valley, with its infamous traffic and endangered quality of life, as a textbook example of what not to do. That’s primarily because the larger community was not consulted and asked to assist in deciding what the area should look like, he says. Thus, the region is in danger of choking on its own success.

Smarr emphasizes that UCSD, as a research institution, isn’t qualified to decide what’s best for the community; that can only be decided by the people themselves. So the university is looking for a dialog with community groups to understand what problems they have and how technology can help solve them.

“We’d like to see engagement from all components of the community, going into the decisions the region must make about improving our infrastructure,” Smarr says. Infrastructure can mean transportation, it can mean pollution control and cleanup, it can mean seismic sensing, it can mean air transportation and water quality — these are all components of the infrastructure and they are all interconnected. We need everybody at the table for these discussions.

“It is the policy of the institute to reach out to everybody, regardless of income or ethnicity or whatever, but we count on partnering with existing outreach organizations and community-based organizations, just as we partner with industry.”

On an individual level, Smarr says the promised benefits of Internet information will be much more available to people of all income levels when it’s easily accessible through cellular phones and handheld computers. That’s because these portable devices are not only more easily used wherever people go, they’re about 10 times cheaper than desktop computer systems.

“If you look at previous mass-market technologies like the VCR, remember that America owned the VCR industry when they cost $2,000. It was an exotic toy for the elite,” Smarr says. “But the Japanese knew if they got the cost below $300, virtually everybody would get one. That mass market led to entirely new industries such as Blockbuster.”

From Horticulture To Teraflops

Smarr was born and raised in Columbia, Mo. His parents ran Smarr’s Florists out of their home. Smarr took to gardening, making him the fifth-generation horticulturist in the family.

“Our house was on four acres of gardens and woods, giving my two brothers and me lots of room to play,” the 53-year-old Smarr writes on his Web site, a site complete with pictures of his parents and himself on his first birthday. “I grew up in the middle of a garden paradise, so I think that’s where a lot of my values about the importance of nature came from,” he says. “The Midwest, bedrock values about hard work and cooperation were pretty deeply implanted at an early age.”

Smarr also became interested in the sea as a child on vacation.

“Every summer we drove down to Pensacola, Fla., and that was the one vacation our family had,” he says. “When I wasn’t in the middle of a garden, I was in the middle of a seashore.”

But even at his birth, signs pointed in retrospect to a computing career at the University of Illinois. As a child, he was an inveterate tinkerer, playing with gadgets from his grandfather, whom he describes as a “classic American inventor.”

“On Oct. 16, 1948, the day I was born, Robert Oppenheimer, just finishing the Manhattan Project, wrote a letter to the dean of engineering at the University of Illinois, saying ‘we like your clone of the computer we’re going to build for (famed mathematician/computer theorist) John Von Neumann’ ... so the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a major place in the history books.”

Smarr’s father encouraged his son to look into computers, telling the young man, “Son, you can do whatever you want, but I think these computers are going to amount to something. So make sure you study some computers.”

While also studying computers, Smarr devoted most of his time to physics. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Missouri, another master’s from Stanford University, and a doctorate degree from the University of Texas at Austin. By the mid-’70s Smarr was a world-known astrophysicist, a job that involved working with computers. In 1979, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, becoming NCSA director in 1985.

“I’m a great believer in passages, the notion that there are periods during your life that are set for different things,” Smarr says. “The 20 years in Urbana we spent raising our children ... and Urbana is one of the great nesting spots on the academic flyway. I was able in Urbana to be creative technically and scientifically, and at the same time develop a close-knit family. So with the kids leaving the nest, it was a natural time to think about the next phase of our lives. That as much as anything got us thinking where we ought to move on to.”

Of Smarr’s family, one son attends Stanford and the other, the University of California at Santa Barbara. His wife, Janet, is a professor in UCSD’s department of theater and dance. They are happy to be here, as Smarr noted last month while looking out a window of his campus office and discussing a snowstorm that had closed the airport in Chicago.

“I’ve been coming to San Diego for 20 years, to La Jolla in particular,” Smarr says. “You can have a life here. There are so many wonderful restaurants and the natural beauty is so extensive. In an hour you can be in the mountains, or the desert or the seashore, or you can be in a foreign country. It’s an extremely rich environment of natural beauty, and places to have fun.

“One of the things we both are looking forward to is getting enough time that we can actually begin to have lives. We work like maniacs all the time.”