What is the Ultrascale Systems Research Center?

The Ultrascale Systems Research Center (USRC) is a collaboration between the New Mexico Consortium (NMC) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to engage universities and industry nationally in support of high performance computing research.

USRC investigates the challenges of computing at extreme scales with a focus on balance and efficiency. We leverage a diversity of disciplines to help solve challenges through applied research and development. Our key focus areas are storage, networking, resilience, system software and machine learning. 

Latest news and events

Articles in Physics World entitled "Cosmic challenge: protecting supercomputers from an extraterrestrial threat" and The Next Platform entitled "Will DeltaFS Become the File System of Exascale's Future?" were published this month including quotes from USRC staff Nathan DeBardeleben and Brad Settlemyer, respectively.  The articles include discussions of the some of the contributions of these staff to these projects.

LANL's EMC3 and Fungible Inc announced a collaboration to explore scalability of computational NVMe over fabrics and will demonstrate offload of analytics functions on data produced by extreme scale physical simulations.  Read more about this announcement here.

October 6, 2020

LANL recently announced a collaboration between LANL, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NVIDIA. The goals of this partnership are to speed up scientific computing through advances in performance efficiency, workflow efficiency, and analytics.  Read more about this announcement here.

LANL has started evaluation of the Fujitsu A64FX processor for improved application efficiency, a driving factor of the Efficient Mission-Centric Computing Consortium.  An article was released discussing this effort which can be seen here.  Additionally, Arm has contributed an open source extension to the OpenSNAPI project, supported by EMC3.  This adds support for persistent memory access, a key driver in next generation application efficiency.  Read more about this announcement here.

The Unified Communication Framework (UCF) collaboration announced the creation of Open Smart Network Application Programming Interface (OpenSNAPI). Read more about it here or through the BUSINESS WIRE article and see the Efficient Mission-Centric Computing Consortium (EMC3) News Page for other news articles.

Texas A&M University Systems National Laboratories Office and LANL have formed a collaborative research effort to make extremely large datasets indexable and more easily searchable. Read more about it here or through the HPCWIRE article and see the EMC3 News Page for other news articles.

The South African National Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System (NICIS) joins LANL's EMC3 and becomes the first international partner. Read more about it here and see the EMC3 News Page for other news articles.

insideHPC posted an article detailing goals and growth of EMC3 over its first year. It includes quotes from High Performance Computing division leader, Gary Grider, and a list of EMC3 members. Read more about it here and see the EMC3 News Page for other news articles.

USRC senior scientist and storage expert, Brad Settlemyer, discusses recent collaboration success with Eideticom as part of LANL's EMC3 effort. Read about it here. See the EMC3 News Page for other news articles.

In the first year of EMC3, LANL completed benchmarking nCorium’s new memory-centric server architecture for viability, functionality and performance in high performance storage. Read more about this collaboration done under the EMC3 on here.

LANL teams with Arm to develop tailored, efficient processor architectures for extreme-scale computing. Read more about this collaboration development done under the EMC3 and the EMC3 News Page.

September 10, 2019

In preparation for a paper to appear in MICRO'19, the Memory Usage Statistical From Open Clusters Data used in the paper is available on our Operational Data page. This work is a collaboration between USRC PI Nathan DeBardeleben and Xun Jian from Virginia Tech.

August 8, 2019

As we say goodbye to our summer students, we wrap up another successful season with our USRC symposium.  Although we hate to see these students go, we are proud of the hard work and dedication they put in each year.  Our symposium site will be updated with the program and photos as soon are they are available. Be sure to check it out to see the interesting problems that we continue to work on.

July 1, 2019

With summer well under way, we have begun preparing for our annual student research symposium. For more information, as well as information related to previous years' symposiums, check out the new research symposium site here.

November 8, 2018

We are excited to begin our collaborations with EMC3. EMC3 investigates ultra-scale computing architectures, systems and environments that can achieve higher efficiencies in extreme-scale, mission-centric computing. Learn more about EMC3's mission and keep up with their news.

Several new data sources have been added for our storage and operational data sections.

November 1, 2018

High Performance Computing (HPC) is essential to the efforts based here in the USRC. Learn more about about the growth and evolution of HPC and LANL by checking out our new historical videos page. For more archived historical content, keep an eye on the history page.

We are proud to announce that we now have our ATLAS and Trinity data available for use! The ATLAS repository contains traces from LANL supercomputers as well as other systems, while the Trinity repository contains telemetry data, environmental data and more. Check out these new data sources here.

The Institute for Reliable High-Performance Information Technology, a collaboration of LANL’s USRC and Carnegie Mellon University, has developed a user-space file system that supports the efficient creation of trillions of files on the Trinity supercomputer, enabling new particle tracking capabilities within scientific simulations. 

October 2018

USRC resilience researchers Blanchard and DeBardeleben, in collaboration with LANL's ISR-1 Suzanne Nowicki, were featured in the Wired article: Cosmic Ray Showers Crash Supercomputers.  Here's What to Do About It.

USRC resilience principal investigator Nathan DeBardeleben and LANL's Suzanne Nowicki were showcased on LANL's YouTube in their work with USRC's Sean Blanchard on neutron detection for supercomputers.

August 2018

The annual USRC student symposium will be held on August 6 on the 2nd floor of the library. All attending will need LANL badges, and foreign nationals need to be approved for that area. Students will be showing off their work from the summer. If able, please attend and show your support!