Snir to Co-Direct New Joint Petascale Laboratory

6/24/2009

UIUC and INRIA to create the Joint Laboratory at Illinois

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The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and INRIA, the French national computer science institute, announced today the formation of the Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing. The Joint Laboratory will be based at Illinois and will include researchers from INRIA, Illinois' Center for Extreme-Scale Computation, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

A formal signing of the agreement between INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique) and Illinois will take place June 10, 2009 in Paris. It will be followed by a two-day petascale computing workshop.

"The Joint Laboratory will focus on software challenges found in complex high-performance computers. Illinois is simply one of the very few places in the world where all skills are gathered to address the key challenges of sustained petascale computing. We're very excited to be facing those challenges with the University of Illinois," said INRIA's Franck Cappello, who will co-direct the Joint Laboratory.

Early focus areas will include:

  • Modeling and optimizing numerical libraries, which are at the heart of many scientific applications.
  • Fault-tolerance research, which reduces the negative impact when processors, disk drives, or memory fail in supercomputers that have tens or hundreds of thousands of those components.
  • Novel programming models, which allow scientific applications to be updated or reimagined to take full advantage of extreme-scale supercomputers.

 

Much of the Joint Laboratory's work will focus on algorithms and software that will run on Blue Waters and other petascale computers. Illinois' Blue Waters is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer available for open scientific research when it comes online in 2011. Petascale computers are those that are capable of sustaining more than one quadrillion calculations per second. Software developed for Blue Waters is also expected to run efficiently on other large-scale parallel computers.

"Blue Waters will only be a success if the scientific applications and software that run on it can scale to hundreds of thousands of processors-well beyond where they are today," said Marc Snir, who will direct the Joint Laboratory with Cappello. Snir is a computer science professor at Illinois and one of the principal investigators on the Blue Waters project.

"There is real urgency to develop the software that will leverage well the powerful Blue Waters platform. International collaborations such as the one we set with INRIA help accelerate that work and make sure it is embraced on other systems."

Illinois is home to a host of international technology collaborations. Most recently, the university established a digital research center with Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research and a center focused on using high-performance computing in scientific simulations with the Cyprus Institute.

About INRIA
INRIA, the French national institute for research in computer science and control, is dedicated to fundamental and applied research in information and communication science and technology. The Institute also plays a major role in technology transfer by fostering training through research, diffusion of scientific and technical information, development, as well as providing expert advice and participating in international programs.

About Center for Extreme-scale Computation
The Center for Extreme-scale Computing is part of the University of Illinois' Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies. CESC focuses on the development of applications and technologies that will help scientists and engineers realize the full potential of future supercomputers. Researcher areas include the use of accelerators like GPUs in scientific computing, the study of new multiscale simulation techniques, and the development of new parallel programming methods and scientific applications.

About NCSA
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, provides powerful computers and expert support that help thousands of scientists and engineers across the country better understand our world. For more than 20 years, NCSA has been a leader in deploying robust high-performance computing resources and in working with research communities to develop new computing and software technologies. Building on this history of leadership, NCSA and its partners are at work on the Blue Waters project, which will provide the national research community with a sustained-petaflop supercomputer.

About Computer Science at Illinois
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois is recognized throughout the world as a leader in computer science education and research, consistently ranked among the top five programs in the nation. The department and its graduates have long been at the forefront of modern computing beginning with ILLIAC in 1952, continuing with Blue Waters, the world's first sustained petaflop computer for open scientific research. For more information, visit www.cs.illinois.edu.


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This story was published June 24, 2009.