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 Watersand 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.