EVL Co-Founder Tom DeFanti Named an HPCwire 35 HPC Legend

HPCwire has named Tom DeFanti, co-founder and director emeritus of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, to its 35 HPC Legends, Class of 2026, recognizing him as a driving force behind HPC visualization.

The honor recognizes a premise DeFanti has held since the start: the results of the world’s fastest computers are useless if people cannot see them, step into them, and share them across a network.

DeFanti earned his PhD at Ohio State University in 1973 under computer graphics pioneer Charles Csuri, where he built GRASS, the real-time graphics system that grew out of his dissertation. That same year he came to UIC and, with artist and physicist Dan Sandin, founded EVL as the first Science + Art program in the country. In 1986 the National Science Foundation invited him onto the panel whose recommendations produced the landmark 1987 Visualization in Scientific Computing report, the document that gave scientific visualization its name and its agenda.

At EVL that work produced the CAVE, introduced at SIGGRAPH 1992 in Chicago as part of the Showcase event DeFanti organized with Argonne, NCSA, and Ameritech. It was the first widely replicated, projection-based, walk-in virtual reality system in the world, and within a year Larry Smarr at NCSA and Rick Stevens at Argonne had built their own. The CAVE was commercially licensed, earned DeFanti UIC’s Inventor of the Year award in 2000, and set the direction for three decades of EVL systems, from the ImmersaDesk and Varrier through CAVE2 and today’s DOCC.

The other half of the story is bandwidth. DeFanti helped organize I-WAY at SC 1995, interconnecting 12 network testbeds, 17 supercomputer centers, and more than 60 application groups. He led EVL’s work on STAR TAP, Euro-Link, and TransLight, and co-founded StarLight with Northwestern and Argonne. CAVEwave, OptIPuter, the Global Lambda Integrated Facility, and the iGrid events followed, all tested the only way he trusted: push a live visualization across the network in front of an audience, where every dropped frame shows.

His recognitions include ACM’s Outstanding Contribution Award (1988), election as an ACM Fellow (1994), and multiple CENIC Innovations in Networking Awards.

DeFanti retired from UIC in 2004 and has collaborated with EVL ever since, first from UC San Diego’s Calit2-Qualcomm Institute, where he built the StarCAVE, SunCAVE, and WAVE. He now works part time with UC San Diego and CENIC, is involved with CENIC-AIR and the National Research Platform, and hosts a weekly NRP meeting. One current project puts sensors, drones, and cameras into a Sonoma County vineyard to build a digital twin, which is a fair summary of the whole career: find the interesting data, then find a way for people to see it.

Congratulations, Tom.