James H. Laros III
About Me
james.laros@gmail.com
James H. Laros III is a Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, with more than 40 years of service to the United States. He began with four years of active duty in the U.S. Air Force and a year in the Air National Guard, then worked as a Systems Analyst for the Strategic Defense Initiative program in Colorado.
Since joining Sandia in 1995, James has worked across high-performance computing (HPC): hierarchical mass storage, file systems, system management and software, reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) systems, and lightweight kernel operating systems. For the past fifteen years he has led advanced-architecture HPC systems. He was chief architect and project lead for Astra (VGI) and Spectra (VGII) under the Vanguard Advanced Architecture Prototype program, chief architect and deputy program manager for ACES Crossroads, and program lead for the Advanced Architecture Testbed and Advanced Memory Technology (AMT) programs. His honors include four Defense Programs Awards of Excellence and three R&D 100 Awards.
Work Experience
2025 - Present
Senior Scientist, Sandia National laboratories
Albuquerque, NM
2019 - 2025
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories
Albuquerque, NM
- Vanguard II & III Program Manager/Chief Architect
- Advanced Memory Technology Program lead
- Advanced Architecture Test Bed Program lead
2000 - 2020
Principal Member of Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories
Albuquerque, NM
- Vanguard/Astra Program Manager/Chief Architect 2017 – 2020
- ATS Lead Architect, Deputy Program Manager 2014 – 2016
- Acting Department Manager 2013 – 2014
- High Performance Computing Power API Project Lead 2012 – 2017
- Advanced Architecture Test Bed Project Lead 2010 – 2025
- Red Storm Systems Software and IO 2004 – 2009
- Computational Plant (CPlant™) Systems Infrastructure Project Lead 2000 – 2005
1997-2001
Senior Member of Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories
Albuquerque, NM
1995-1997
Member of Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories
Albuquerque, NM
1989-1995
Senior Systems Analyst, Martin Marietta
1987-1989
Senior Satellite Controller, Contel Federal Systems
1983-1987
Non-Commissioned Officer, SGT United States Air Force
Education
2012
Master of Science Computer Engineering
University of New Mexico - Albuquerque, NM
1998
Bachelor of Science Computer Science
Chapman University, Orange County California
1982
Associate in Applied Science Drafting and Design Technology
Northampton County Area Community College, Bethlehem Pennsylvania
Referred Publications
“Breaking the mold: Overcoming the time constraints of molecular dynamics on general-purpose hardware”
Danny Perez, Aidan Thompson, Stan Moore, Tomas Oppelstrup, Ilya Sharapov, Kylee Santos, Amirali Sharifian, Delyan Z Kalchev, Robert Schreiber, Scott Pakin, Edgar A Leon, James H Laros, Michael James, Sivasankaran Rajamanickam, The Journal of Chemical Physics, February 2025
“Breaking the Molecular Dynamics Timescale Barrier Using a Wafer-Scale System”
Kylee Santos and Stan Moore and Tomas Oppelstrup and Amirali Sharifian and Ilya Sharapov and Aidan Thompson and Delyan Z Kalchev and Danny Perez and Robert Schreiber and Scott Pakin and Edgar A Leon and James H Laros III and Michael James and Sivasankaran Rajamanickam, Gordon Bell Finalist, SC24 Conference Atlanta GA, USA, November 2024.
“APE: Metrics for understanding application performance efficiency under power caps”
David DeBonis, Trilce Estrada, Ryan E. Grant, Kevin T. Pedretti, James H. Laros III, Dorian Arnold, Journal of Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems Volume 34, April 2022 100702
"Chronicles of Astra: Challenges and Lesson from the First Petascale Arm Supercomputer,"
Kevin T. Pedretti, Andrew J Younge, Simon David Hammond, James H. Laros III, Matthew Leon Curry, Michael J. Aguilar, Robert J. Hoekstra, Ronald B. Brightwell, Conference Paper, SC20 Conference Tutorial in Atlanta, GA, USA, November 2020.
"Enabling Power Measurement and Control on Astra: The First Petascale Arm Supercomputer,"
Ryan E. Grant, Simon David Hammond, James H. Laros III, Michael J. Levenhagen, Stephen Lecler Olivier, Kevin Pedretti, Harry Lee Ward, Andrew J Younge, Conference Paper, Cray User Group, November 2020.
"Evaluating the Marvell ThunderX2 Server Processor for HPC Workloads,"
Simon D. Hammond, David, Clayton Hughes, Michael J. Levenhagen, Courtenay T. Vaughan, Andrew J Younge, Benjamin Schwaller, Michael J Aguilar, Kevin Pedretti, James H. Laros III, Conference Paper, The 6th Special Session on High-Performance Computing Benchmarking and Optimization (HPBench 2019), July 2019.
“Small scale to extreme: Methods for characterizing energy efficiency in supercomputing applications”
Andrew J. Younge, Ryan E. Grant, James H. Laros III, Michael Levenhagen, Stephen L. Olivier, Kevin Pedretti, Lee Ward, Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems, Volume 21, March 2019, Pages 90-102 Elsevier
“A Comparison of Power Management Mechanisms: P-States vs. Node-Level Power Cap Control”
Kevin Pedretti, Ryan E. Grant, James H. Laros III, Michael Levenhagen, Stephen L. Olivier, Lee Ward, Andrew J. Younge, The 14th Workshop on High-Performance, Power-Aware Computing (HPPAC) 2018
“Evaluating Energy and Power Profiling Techniques for HPC Workloads”
Ryan E. Grant, James H. Laros, Michael Levenhagen, Stephen L. Olivier, Kevin Pedretti, Lee Ward, Andrew Younge, Eighth International Green and Sustainable Computing Conference (IGSC), 2017
"Exascale Co-design Progress and Accomplishments – Advances in Parallel Computing Series, chapter: Convergence of Big Data and High-Performance Computing “
Ang, JA, Cook, J, Domino, SP, Glass, MW, Hammond, SD, Hemmert, KS, Heroux, Hoekstra, RJ, Laros III, JH, Lin, PT, Nam, HA Neely, R, Rodrigues, AF, Trott, CR., IOS Press, Amsterdam, New York, Tokyo, SAND2017-8788B. 2017.Book Chapter:
“Standardizing Power Monitoring and Control at Exascale”
Ryan E. Grant, Michael Levenhagen, Stephen L. Olivier, David DeBonis, Kevin T. Pedretti, James H. Laros III, IEEE Computer, 2016
“Overcoming Challenges in Scalable Power Monitoring with the Power API”
Ryan E. Grant, Michael Levenhagen, Stephen L Olivier, David DeBonis, Kevin Pedretti, James H. Laros III, Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops, 2016
“ACES and Cray Collaborate on Advanced Power Management for Trinity”
James H. Laros III, Kevin Pedretti, Ryan E. Grant, Stephen L. Olivier, Michael Levenhagen, David DeBonis, Scott Pakin, Steven Martin, Matthew Kappel, Paul Falde, Cray Users Group, 2016
“Metrics for Evaluating Energy Savings Techniques for Resilient HPC Systems”
Ryan E. Grant, Stephen L. Olivier, James H. Laros III, Ron Brightwell, IEEE 28th International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops, 2014
“An evaluation of BitTorrent's performance in HPC environments”
Matthew G. F. Dosanjh, Patrick G. Bridges, Suzanne M. Kelly, James H. Laros, III, and Courtenay T. Vaughan, ROSS ’14 Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers, 2014
“PowerInsight – A Commodity Power Measurement Capability”
James H. Laros III, Phil Pokorny, David DeBonis, The Third International Workshop on Power Measurement and Profiling in conjunction with IEEE IGCC, 2013
“Using Mini-applications in a Mantevo Framework for Optimizing Sandia's SPARC CFD Code on Multi-Core, Many-Core, and GPU-Accelerated Compute Platforms”
Daniel W. Barnette, Richard F. Barrett, Simon D. Hammond, Jagan Jayaraj, James H. Laros, III, 51st AIAA ASM Conference, 2013
“Energy-Efficient High-Performance Computing – Measurement and Tuning”
James H. Laros III, Kevin T. Pedretti, Suzanne M. Kelly, Wei Shu, Kurt Ferreira, John Van Dyke, Courtenay T. Vaughan, Book, Springer Publications, Springer Briefs in Computer Science ISBN 978-1-4471-4491-5, 2013
“Does Partial Replication Pay Off?”
Jon Stearley, Kurt Ferreira, David Robinson, Dorian Arnold, Patrick Bridges, James Laros, Kevin Pedretti and Rolf Riesen, Fault Tolerance for HPC at Extreme Scale (FTXS), 2012
“A Peer-to-Peer Architecture for Supporting Dynamic Shared Libraries in Large-Scale Systems”
Matthew G.F. Dosanjh, Patrick G. Bridges, Suzanne M. Kelly, James H. Laros III, 41st International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops, 2012
“Energy Based Performance Tuning for Large-Scale High-Performance Computing Systems”
James H. Laros III, Kevin T. Pedretti, Suzanne M. Kelly, Wei Shu, Courtenay T. Vaughan, 20th High-Performance Computing Symposium – BEST PAPER, 2012
“Evaluating the Viability of Process Replication Reliability for Exascale Systems”
Kurt Ferreira, Jon Stearley, James H. Laros III, Ron Oldfield, Kevin T. Pedretti, Ron Brightwell, Rolf Riesen, Patrick G. Bridges, Dorian Arnold, International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC), 2011
“The Impact of Injection Bandwidth Performance on Application Scalability”
Kevin T. Pedretti, Ron Brightwell, Doug Doerfler, K. Scott Hemmert, James H. Laros III, EuroMPI, 2011
“Shared Libraries on a Capability Class Computer”
Suzanne M. Kelly, Ruth Klundt, James H. Laros III, Cray Users Group, 2011
“Topics on Measuring Real Power Usage on High Performance Computing Platforms”
James H. Laros III, Kevin T. Pedretti, Suzanne M. Kelly, John P. Vandyke, Kurt B. Ferreira, Courtenay T. Vaughan, Mark Swan, IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, 2009
“Investigating Real Power Use on Red Storm”
James H. Laros III, Kevin T. Pedretti, Suzanne M. Kelly, John P. Vandyke, Courtenay T. Vaughan, Mark Swan, Cray Users Group 2009
“Performance Analysis of the SiCortex SC092”
Martin, Brian J (student), Andrew J. Leiker (student), James H. Laros, III, Douglas W. Doerfler – The 10th LCI International Conference on High-Performance Clustered Computing, Boulder, CO, BEST STUDENT PAPER, 2009
“Red Storm IO Performance Analysis”
James H. Laros III, Lee Ward, Ruth Klundt, Sue Kelly, James Tomkins, Brian Kellogg, IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, 2007
“Red Storm Systems Management: Topics on Extending Current Capabilities”
James H. Laros III, Cray Users Group, 2006
"A Minimal Linux Environment for High Performance Computing Systems (HPC)”
James H. Laros III, Cynthia Segura, Nathan Dauchy, The 10th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, 2006
“A Software and Hardware Architecture for a Modular, Portable, Extensible Reliability Availability and Serviceability System”
James H. Laros III, HPCRI: 2nd Workshop on High Performance Computing Reliability Issues, 2006
“The Cluster Integration Toolkit – An Extensible, Portable, Scalable Cluster Management Software Implementation”
James H. Laros III, Lee Ward, Nathan W. Dauchy, James Vasak, Ruth Klundt, Glen Laguna, Marcus Epperson, Jon R. Stearley Proceedings of the 1st Cluster World Conference and Expo, 2003
“Implementing Scalable Disk-less Clusters Using the Network File System (NFS)”
James H. Laros III and Lee H. Ward, Proceedings of the 4th Symposium of the Los Alamos Computer Science Institute: LACSI 2003, 2003
“An Extensible, Portable, Scalable, Cluster Management Software Architecture”
James H. Laros III, Lee Ward, Nathan W. Dauchy, Ron Brightwell, Trammell Hudson, Ruth Klundt, Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, 2002
Technical Reports and Other Publications
“FY26 L2 Milestone Vanguard II Spectra Performance Analysis”,
James H. Laros III, Alex Council, Matthew Curry, Simon Garcia de Gonzalo, Robert Hoekstra, Clay Hughes, Scott Levy, Carl Pearson, Kevin Stroup, Courtenay Vaughan, Andrew Younge, SAND2026-26141
“FY24 L2 Milestone #9021 Report: Advancing the Utility of Data Flow Accelerators for NNSA Computing Systems”,
Carl Pearson, Simon Garcia de Gonzalo, Alex Council, Matthew Curry, Robert Hoekstra, Clay Hughes, James H. Laros III, Kevin Pedretti, Kevin Stroup, Christian Trott, Andrew Younge
“FY22 L2 Milestone #7926 Report: Evaluation of Data Flow Hardware Accelerators for Mission Relevant Mini-Apps and Kernels”
James H. Laros III, Alex Council, Matthew Curry, Griffin Dube, Simon Garcia de Gonzalo, Simon Hammond, Robert Hoekstra, Clay Hughes, Carl Pearson, Kevin Pedretti, Kevin Stroup, Andrew Younge SAND2022-12037O
“FY17 CSSE L2 Milestone Report: Analyzing Power Usage Characteristics of Workloads Running on Trinity”
Ryan E. Grant, James H. Laros, Michael Levenhagen, Stephen L. Olivier, Kevin Pedretti, Lee Ward, Andrew Younge, SAND2017-10191
“High Performance Computing Power Application Programming Interface Specification”
James H. Laros III, David Debonis, Ryan Grant, Suzanne M. Kelly, Michael Levenhagen, Stephen Olivier, Kevin Pedretti, SAND2014-17061, 2014
“DOE Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Subcommittee (ASCAC) Report: Top Ten Exascale Research Challenges”
Lucas, Robert; Ang, James; Bergman, Keren; Borkar, Shekhar; Carlson, William; Carrington, Laura; Chiu, George; Colwell, Robert; Dally, William; Dongarra, Jack; Geist, Al; Haring, Rud; Hittinger, Jeffrey; Hoisie, Adolfy; Klein, Dean Micron; Kogge, Peter; Lethin, Richard; Sarkar, Vivek; Schreiber, Robert; Shalf, John; Sterling, Thomas; Stevens, Rick; Bashor, Jon; Brightwell, Ron; Coteus, Paul; Debenedictus, Erik; Hiller, Jon; Kim, K. H.; Langston, Harper; Murphy, Richard; Webster, Clayton; Wild, Stefan; Grider, Gary; Ross, Rob; Leyffer, Sven; Laros III, James, DOE ASCAC Subcommittee Report, 2014
“Power/Energy Use Cases for High Performance Computing”
James H. Laros III, Suzanne M. Kelly, Steven Hammond, Ryan Elmore, Kristen Munch, SAND2013- 10789, 2013
“Investigating an API for Resilient Exascale Computing”
Jon Stearley, James Tomkins, Patrick Bridges, John VanDyke, Kurt B. Ferreira, James H. Laros III, SAND2013-3790, 2013
"Advanced Architecture Test Beds”
Suzanne, M. Kelly, James A. Ang, James H. Laros III, DOE ASC/ASCR Exascale Research Conference, 2012
“rMPI: Increasing Fault Resiliency in a Message-Passing Environment”
Kurt Ferreira, Rolf Riesen, Ron Oldfield, Jon Stearley, James H. Laros III, Kevin Pedretti, Ron Brightwell, SAND2011-2488, 2011
“Redundant Computing for Exascale Systems”
Rolf Riesen, Kurt Ferreira, Jon Stearley, Ron Oldfield, James H. Laros III, Kevin Pedretti, and Ron Brightwell, Technical report SAND2010- 8709, Sandia National Laboratories, 2010
“Report of Experiments and Evidence for ASC L2 Milestone 4467 - Demonstration of a Legacy Application’s Path to Exascale”
Brian Barrett, Richard Barrett, James Brandt, Ron Brightwell, Matthew Curry, Nathan Fabian, Kurt Ferreira, Ann Gentile, Scott Hemmert, Suzanne Kelly, Ruth Klundt, James Laros III, Vitus Leung, Michael Levenhagen, Gerald Lofstead, Ken Moreland, Ron Oldfield, Kevin Pedretti, Arun Rodrigues, David Thompson, Tom Tucker, Lee Ward, John Van Dyke, Courtenay Vaughan, and Kyle Wheeler, SAND2012-1750, 2012
“Increasing Fault Resiliency in a Message-Passing Environment”
Kurt Ferreira, Rolf Riesen, Ron Oldfield, Jon Stearley, James Laros, Kevin Pedretti, Ron Brightwell, and Todd Kordenbrock. Technical report SAND2009-6753, Sandia National Laboratories, 2009
“Investigating Methods of Supporting Dynamically Linked Executables on High Performance Computing Platforms”
James Howard Laros III, Suzanne M. Kelly, Michael J. Levenhagen, Kevin T. Pedretti, SAND Report, 2009
“High End Computing Resilience: Analysis of Issues Facing the HEC Community and Path-Forward for Research and Development”
Nathan DeBardeleben, James H. Laros III, John Daly, Stephen Scott, Christian Engelmann, Bill Harrod, Whitepaper, 2009
Research Interests
High Performance Computing (HPC), emerging novel technologies including spatial, dataflow, AI/ML and Quantum, Power and Energy Efficiency, Operating Systems, Light Weight Kernels, Reliability Availability and Serviceability (RAS) Systems, Parallel IO, Systems Software, HPC Systems Management
Awards
Affiliations/Memberships
Member IEEE and IEEE Computer Society