Larry Carter received the A.B. degree from Dartmouth College in 1969 and the Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1974. He worked at as a Research Staff Member and manager at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center for nearly 20 years in the areas of probabilistic algorithms, compilers, VLSI testing, and high-performance computation.

From 1994 to 2004, Dr. Carter was a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University of California at San Diego. Between 1996 and 2000, he served as Vice Chair and then Chair of the department. His current research interests include scientific computation, performance programming, parallel computation, and computer architecture. Prof. Carter is a Senior Fellow at the San Diego Supercomputing Center, a Fellow of the IEEE, and a Professor Emeritus at UCSD.