Institute for Advanced Studies

Steven Buelow - Leader

The Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) works with the three New Mexico Research Universities ( the University of New Mexico, New Mexico Tech, and New Mexico State University) to develop research and educational collaborations and partnerships.  To facilitate interactions between the Universities and LANL,  the three New Mexico Schools established the New Mexico Consortium (NMC), a non-profit corporation. The NMC:

• Leverages the strengths of three research universities to achieve common goals,
• Builds joint programs in support of common interests,
• Develops strategic partnerships with government, industry and other universities in support of the partnership, and
• Provides common organization and facilities to support these initiatives.

A major role of the IAS is to develop and manage the interactions between LANL and the NMC. The IAS and the NMC have created the framework for the development of joint research projects. LANL staff can work part-time for the NMC on NMC projects that are of mutual benefit to the Laboratory and the NMC.  A number of LANL staff members have established joint research programs within the NMC.  The IAS oversees LANL staff participation in NMC projects. Programs must meet the following requirements:

• Proposed projects must have a clear benefit to LANL and the NMC.
• LANL management must pre-approve possible staff employment by the NMC before LANL staff members begin working on joint NMC proposals. 
• Participation in the projects must not negatively impact partner institutions.
• Funding for joint projects should be through partner institutions and not through the NMC unless there is a compelling reason to support the program through the NMC.
• The combined effort for any LANL staff member working with the NMC cannot exceed 1.0 FTE. 
• Employment by NMC of LANL staff must not create a conflict of interest with LANL employment. 
• All intellectual property (IP) produced by staff from partner institutions is assigned back to the home institution unless an agreement is put in place with the NMC specific to the project before the IP is developed.

The purpose of the NMC is to facilitate collaborations among the partnership.  These collaborations are structured  to optimize the benefit to the partnerships and the competitiveness of the proposal by using many different mechanisms. NMC can team on proposals with funding going separately to each partner institution; either directly from the sponsor, or indirectly as a subcontractor from the proposal’s lead institution.

The NMC's supports a wide range of research.  For access to the full web sites for current initiatives, LANL staff can join  join the NMC Network. This network provides information about NM University and LANL staff research interests in these areas, research working groups, external funding targets, workshops and conferences and other information about these initiatives.

Current Collaborations with the New Mexico Consortium

The Ultrascale Systems Research Center (USRC) is a collaboration between the NMC and LANL to engage universities and industry nationally in support of exascale research.
In its initial phase USRC includes the following research topics as they relate to Exascale:

• OS/systems/network software stacks
• Scalable and Reliable Runtimes and Middleware
• IO/Storage
• Data Intensive (DISC)
• Cyber-Security

The Parallel Reconfigurable Observational Environment (PRObE) is an NSF-sponsored project aimed at providing a large-scale, low-level systems research facility. It is a collaborative effort by the New Mexico Consortium, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Utah, and the University of New Mexico. It is housed at NMC in the Los Alamos Research Park.

PRObE will provide a highly reconfigurable, remotely accessible and controllable environment that researchers can use to perform experiments that are not possible at a smaller scale. PRObE at full production scale provides at least two 1024 node clusters, one of 200 nodes, and some smaller machines with extreme core count and bleeding edge technology.  The machines are retired large clusters donated by DOE facilities.