Larry Smarr - NCSA - History: The First Internet - NSFNet

I'll show you the Berners-Lee footage, it's I have to tell you that I'm a

giant fan of yours. >> Oh really? >> Yes I am. I mean I don't know you and I've

never met you but I, it seems to me as though maybe, maybe I'm just, it's just

the Larry Smarr image rather than the real Larry Smarr. >> You'll have to

tell me what that is. [laugh] I'm the one person that never

gets to see that. >> The Larry Smarr image? >> Yeah, right.

You don't know when you're inside it. >> Yeah. I didn't know you were an astronomer.

You know Bob Stein by any chance? >> Sure. >> Bob Stein is my mentor.

>> Really? Oh yeah, we gave Bob lots of time. >> Yeah, I heard he's like in top

five here. Bob is the guy that taught me high-performance computing.

>> I go way back with him. Tom Wolf used to be a good

friend of ours, before he had his stroke or heart attack,

or whatever it was. >> And, but I mean to me it, after. >> So we don't

get disrupted. Why don't you take this and put it over there? Tell Tara to hold my

calls, As to the why an astronomer got into this... >> Yeah, go ahead. Right.

>> Okay. >> I mean tell me, tell me how this NCSA started. I mean,

the, the whole purpose of this. >> Mm-hm. >> is, is, it's sort of about NCSA.

It's not as much about Netscape and Mosaic. I mean, I'm curious, as a high-performance

computing guy, about how, why, it happened here. >> Right. >> Which is, I think

>> Yeah. I can tell you about that. >>. Okay. So go ahead. Tell me about NCSA.

>> Okay. Does the little red light go on when you're >> Yep. I'm recording.

>> Okay good. Well, I am a trained relativistic astrophysicist. And I

got my Ph.Ds always in physics departments, working on astrophysics

problems involving general relativity, gas dynamics, and so forth. So in the 70s,

when I was developing what is now called numerical general relativity, which is the

way to solve Einstein's equations for dynamics of black holes, colliding black holes,

or in astrophysics that required general relativity like supernova events and so

on, I had to go and get a top-secret nuclear weapons clearance to get access to

supercomputers, because in the mid-70s the only place to get a supercomputer was

either at Livermore, Los Alamos, or in one area which was weather. Now astronomy has

always been a driver of supercomputing and in fact on Johnny von Neumann's

computer that was built by the institute, half of that went to Army, to Aberdeen.

Half of that was used of course for the Army for trajectory calculations but the other half

was used for stellar evolution. So astronomy and von Neumann's interest in

weather meant that astronomy and weather for 50 years basically have been dominant

drivers of supercomputing usage. And yet to do pure astrophysics you're having to

get a top-secret nuclear weapons clearance. Now, nobody seemed to think

there was anything unusual about this. And so I just went ahead as a post doc and I

would get a few months in the summer, work 100 hours a week. And then, the rest of

the year I'd had to live off of that. I'd go back to Harvard where I was a junior

fellow. Try to explain to them about, you know, one could solve the laws of physics

that we had been laying down for 300 years in incredible detail for engineering

devices like nuclear weapons that put on Earth temperatures of the center of the

sun, stresses beyond anything that we could imagine in academic problems that we were

trying to solve in lots of disciplines. So, this thing could revolutionize

academic research. Well, nobody got it. I mean it was like, I really felt like I was

transitioning in a flying saucer between this advanced civilization at Livermore,

and the stone-age culture at Harvard, and Harvard was as advanced as any place in

thinking about this, so it was a, what, I didn't figure this out until it was in the

early 80s and by then the first Cray had gone into the continent of Europe at an

open scientific institute, the Max Planck Institute of Physics and Astrophysics.

So I'm over there in the summer along with people like Dave Arnet, who was one of the

great supernova supercomputer guys in our country, and people in chemistry, and it

was like Paris in the 20s with all these expatriates sitting over there. And we're

like trying to figure this out, like this is an American-built supercomputer, right?

Why are we in Munich, right? I mean this is very strange. So, but you know in

America we don't question the infrastructure somehow. I mean it's just

like it's either there or it isn't there and that's just the way it is. But I was having a

mass of beer late one night, actually I think it was the second mass of beer, with my

German host who had also been born like I was, postwar, and he finally turns to me

and he says, aren't you ashamed of yourself, you big, rich occupying country?

You come over here in our little country and, and we finally get enough money

scraped together after World War II to buy one of these supercomputers, and you

Americans come over here and use up our time. He says, how did you guys ever win

the war? You know? What is going on here? And this finally just sort of just stimulated

me into saying, what is going on here? This is nuts. And I went back and I found

out, for instance, that after the Sputnik Program, the Federal Government had funded

the universities, built the science buildings, started the supercomputer centers,

IBM would go around and give away almost the mainframes, and so the

scientists in the 60s took it for granted that they had the fastest computers in

the world in academia. But about 1970, with the starting of the Vietnam War, and with

all kinds of guns and butters issues and everything else, that stopped.

And in fact, to give you an example, by 78, half the number of Ph.Ds and engineers in

engineering was being generated in our country as there were in 1970. So, there

was this complete severing of the Sputnik-era partnership with the Federal

Government and it was particularly bad in computing. To give you an example, when I

was at Livermore in the 70s, there were four CDC 7600s, which were just one of

the finest supercomputers ever built. No American university ever took delivery of

a single CDC 7600. In fact, the University of Illinois, when I first got here, had

a Cyber 175 which was a retread, a second design manufacturing of, of this thing.

And we were one of the first universities that had it, and people all thought that,

you know, Illinois naturally was way ahead of everybody else. So it's like, we were

just completely divorced from the private sector that was generating these wonderful

machines because of federal policy, which was to say, these things are only, are so

valuable that we can only afford to put them into war environments. So, after this

German encounter I came back and I said, well gee, I wonder how many other scientists like me

are there. So, at the University of Illinois, I started calling, cold calling

my colleagues, and saying hi, you don't know me. I'm a little assistant professor

but I bet you that your research is blocked by lack of access to

supercomputers, and they'd sort of say like, who? Crack, crack. Who is this? You

know, [laugh] crank call and but we'd start talking in chemistry and biology and

agriculture and so on and, and sure enough, it turns out that, that, that was

true. They knew how to do the science, they just didn't have access. So I said,

well send me a little prospectus of what science you could do if you had a

supercomputer. Well, I ended up with 65 faculty and 15 departments on one

campus and I thought, this is got to be all this way all over the country so it

was, I really said, well gee, somebody's got to raise this issue. And about that

time there had been a Lax Report, that had the Federal Government had done that began

to uncover some of this stuff and they still weren't, I remember Peter Lax, he was one of

the greatest mathematicians, head of, one of the top people in the Courant Institute, a long-time

advocate of things computational, and I had this long, long battle with Peter, because

in the draft report of the Lax report, it was not, it was going to say, well yeah,

we ought to get one of these supercomputers and make it available to the universities

but, you know, let's put it at Livermore or put it somewhere that people know how to

do this stuff. And a university was not on the list of what the Lax report

considered to be appropriate sites for a supercomputer. So I had this long battle

over the telephone, I remember, with Peter Lax. It was sort of David and Goliath because

I mean he was this giant of the field and I'm nobody. And I, I finally convinced him not

to exclude universities as a possibility, even though he felt that it was fairly

unlikely that any of them would be able to play with sharp instruments and not hurt

themselves. So, I mean, you've got to understand the world was totally different

when the Supercomputer Center's program was coming into being. And people, it's so

hard for people now on the web and everything to go back to that time.

There was no Internet, you know? There was, there was these wonderful people,

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn and all these people, Bill Joy, who had developed

TCP/IP, and embodied it in the ARPANET. This was a few computer science

departments and military, okay? Nobody in a physics department or chemistry

department ever heard of the ARPANET, much less had any access to it. But it was

obviously the right idea. And so once we got the Congress to put through money for

a national supercomputer program, then there was a national competition, and

so on, and the five centers were selected. The first thing then that NSF realized,

well okay, now we put these in place to be providing access to academic scientists,

and yet, like, they have to fly to Champaign-Urbana like I had to fly to

Livermore, okay? This isn't right. So there were a lot of discussions then. But the

trouble was that the telecom lobbyists in Washington would block any discussion of

the Federal Government putting in the kind of network we have today, which is what

people wanted. I mean, everybody knew that they wanted to have a ubiquitous email

person-to-person network. But as soon as they'd start talking about that the

telecom lobbyists would come up and say, no way, guys. That's private sector.

Don't get the Federal Government involved in that. Stay out of it. So what we learned

early on is real interesting. It's like if we had argued instead of the

supercomputer program, let's get the Federal Government to buy everybody a

personal computer, which was IBM personal computer was two years old in 1985, and put

on people's desks, okay? Again, this would be an interference with the private

sector. So, but we said oh, we'll just take a few of these esoteric supercomputers.

And, is that okay? That's right, there's no market there, that's okay, the Federal

Government has a role. Well, it was the same thing with networking. What we said is,

we just want to put a high-speed backbone across the country to connect the

five centers and, and the telecom people said, okay, that's cool, you know

56 kilobits was the national high-speed backbone. Less than ISDN today.

Yeah, that's not a market, okay? And, and so we've got a few of these weird

supercomputer types who are out in the universities who want to hook into that.

They said, yeah that's okay. That's not a market. You can do that. Well,

that was the NSF Net backbone. Then the regionals got funded. And then the

campuses were afraid if they didn't dig up their quad and put in some fiber then the

professors who wanted to get access to supercomputers would go to a university

that would do that, so gradually the whole Internet emerged out of the, the sort of

policy vise you get into Washington where you can't do the right thing.

You have to do something that seems irrelevant, but has a logic to it that will

gradually bring the market forces into play. That will spin out, ultimately,

a whole industry.

Larry Smarr - NCSA

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