ATSE

The Advanced Tri-lab Software Environment (ATSE) is a collaborative software initiative led by Sandia National Laboratories in partnership with Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories — the “tri-labs” of the NNSA weapons complex. ATSE builds an open, modular, extensible, and vendor-adaptable software ecosystem to support leading-edge prototype HPC systems under the Vanguard Program and the broader ASC program.

Andrew contributed to ATSE throughout the Vanguard Astra deployment and as part of the NNSA CSSE program. The current project lead is Matthew Curry (Sandia, Scalable System Software department).

Software stack layers:

• Application development — Compilers (including Arm compiler toolchains), math libraries, MPI, OpenMP, and developer tools
• System software — Optimized Linux kernel, network stack, file systems, containers, and virtual machines
• Job management — Workload manager, application launcher, and user-facing job tools
• System administration — Boot processes, monitoring, and OS image management

ATSE extends the Tri-lab Operating System Stack (TOSS) and integrates software from the DOE Exascale Computing Project, combining vendor software with open-source solutions to create a productive user environment during early availability phases of prototype systems. A key emphasis is active upstream contribution — ATSE contributors port software to new architectures, identify and characterize bugs with vendors, and feed improvements back to the open-source community rather than maintaining long-lived forks.

ATSE was initially developed to accelerate the maturity of the Arm ecosystem for ASC computing, with Astra as the first target platform. Its modular design enables deployment across successive Vanguard prototype systems as new architectures are evaluated.

Source code: github.com/supercontainers/atse
Project page: vanguard.sandia.gov/ATSE

Related publications: [1], [2], [3]