Overview
The Scalable Systems Lab is a research laboratory in the Computer Science Department at the University of New Mexico. We collaborate closely with the UNM Center for Advanced Research Computing, the Scalable Computing Systems Department at Sandia National Laboratories, the Computer and Computational Sciences Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and research groups at a variety of corporations, for example Cray and Intel.
Goal
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 we use are 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.
- We generally seek to minimize the services that are required and to make as many services optional as possible to achieve this goal. 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.
- The challenge associated with using commodity components is the conflict between the intended use of the component and our planned use of the component.