The Soul of the Ultimate Machine Several times in the past, Dr. Smarr had equally radical ideas about where computing was headed, and each
time he correctly spotted the Next Big Thing.

He founded the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign in 1985, and helped to develop a network that linked it to the nation's other four supercomputer
centers.

His center also did pioneering work in scientific visualization, and one of its brightest scientists, Stefen
Fangmeier, went on to become a leading graphics animator in Hollywood. There, he helped to create special
effects for movies like "Jurassic Park" and "The Perfect Storm."

Yet those advances pale beside the fact that seven years ago, a small group of student and faculty researchers
working at Dr. Smarr's center created the first graphical Web browser, Mosaic, igniting the World Wide Web
and the electronic- commerce explosion.

The center's advances flowed directly from Dr. Smarr's passion over the last three decades: to use powerful
computers to improve the quality of science. His goal in developing the supercomputer centers was to give
tools to scientists that had once been available only to bomb designers and code breakers.

The Internet and the World Wide Web grew in part from his drive to build better computer tools to permit
scientists to collaborate and share information.