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

The success of the JLPC motivated its extension to other partners. Argonne National Laboratory joined in 2013.  Barcelona Supercomputing Center joined in 2014 and Jülich Supercomputing Centre joined in 2015. In June 2014 the JLPC became the Joint-Laboratory on Extreme Scale Computing. The JLESC is still based at Illinois.

New partners are expected to joint the JLESC in the comming months.