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May 4, 2001
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Introduction

The Scalable Systems Laboratory is a research laboratory in the Computer Science Department at the University of New Mexico. The Laboratory also enjoys a close affiliation with the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center at the University of New Mexico and the Scalable Computing Systems Department at Sandia National Laboratories. 

The goal of the Scalable Systems Laboratory is to develop approaches for the design and implementation of large-scale, high-performance computing systems for resource constrained (Grand Challenge) applications. The approaches considered will be driven by the measurable needs of resource constrained applications. 

  • Our goal is to provide an execution environment for resource constrained applications. 
  • We define success by our ability to deliver 90% of the available resources to the application (e.g., 90% of the physical memory, 90% of the available communication bandwidth) 
  • Our current focus is on building very large computing systems from commodity components. 
  • To be able to take advantage of the delivered resources, applications must see easily predictable performance (e.g., message passing latencies) so they can be tuned for the environment. 
  • Our approach is to minimize the services that are required and to make as many services optional as possible. That is, whenever a service can be moved to an application level library, without a significant performance or security penalty, we will prefer that approach. An alternative is to consider dynamic services that are migrated into and out of the lower levels as needed (this is tricky, because it may introduce unpredictable behavior into the application). 
  • The challenge associated with using commodity components is the conflict between the intended use of the component and our planned use of the component. 

Maintained by: Barney Maccabe