From June 2009-June 2014, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and INRIA, the French national computer science institute, formed the Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing. The Joint Laboratory is based at Illinois and includes researchers from INRIA, Illinois’ Center for Extreme-Scale Computation, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. It focuses on software challenges found in complex high-performance computers.

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.

More on the lab website