The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, INRIA, the French national computer science institute, Argonne National Laboratory, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Jülich Supercomputing Centre and the RIKEN Center for Computational Science formed the Joint Laboratory on Extreme Scale Computing, a follow-up of the Inria-Illinois Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing. The Joint Laboratory is based at Illinois and includes researchers from INRIA, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Argonne National Laboratory, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, and RIKEN Center for Computational Science as well as JLESC Fellows. It focuses on software challenges found in extreme scale high-performance computers.
Research areas include:
- Scientific applications (big compute and big data) that are the drivers of the research in the other topics of the joint-laboratory.
- Modeling and optimizing numerical libraries, which are at the heart of many scientific applications.
- Novel programming models and runtime systems, which allow scientific applications to be updated or reimaginedto take full advantage of extreme-scale supercomputers.
- Resilience and 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.
- I/O and visualization, which are important part of parallel execution for numerical simulations and data analytics
- HPC Clouds, that may execute a portion of the HPC workload in the near future.
History of the Joint Lab
In June 2009, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and INRIA, the French national computer science institute, formed the Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing. The JLPC was based at Illinois and included researchers from INRIA, Illinois Center for Extreme-Scale Computation, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. It focused on software challenges found in complex high-performance computers.
The success of the JLPC motivated its extension to other partners. Argonne National Laboratory joined in 2013. Barcelona Supercomputing Center joined in 2014 and the JLPC became the Joint Laboratory on Extreme Scale Computing. Jülich Supercomputing Centre and RIKEN Center for Computational Science (then RIKEN AICS) joined in 2015. From 2018 to 2024, the University of Tennessee was an associate partner. In 2024, the JLESC Fellowship program was initiated, honoring individuals by inviting them to participate in JLESC activities such as workshops and projects.