====== Experimental Computing Lab (ExCL) ======

The Experimental Computing Lab (ExCL) was established in 2004 with the goal of providing application users and computer scientists with access to leading-edge computing systems. ExCL is managed by the [[http://ft.ornl.gov|Future Technologies Group]]. ExCL researchers investigate architectures such as multicore processors, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), Cell Broadband Engines (CBEs), and Multi-Threaded Array Processors (MTAPs). Most hardware is located in a large access-controlled server room at ORNL in the JICS/NICS building, near the Future Technology Group.


===== More Information =====

  * Director: Jeffrey Vetter ([[vetter@ornl.gov]])
  * ExCL Team: Philip Roth, Jeremy Meredith, Collin McCurdy.
  * Account Request Form: http://ft.ornl.gov/accounts/
  * General Help: [[excl-help@email.ornl.gov]]

====== Systems ======
===== Compute Servers =====

  * A 31-node **Linux Networx cluster** (Yoda1.ornl.gov) consisting of 32-bit Intel Xeon 2.6GHz processors, networked with Gigabit Ethernet and 4x SDR IB, which serves as a testbed for system software research including operating systems and parallel filesystems. 
  * Dual socket 2.4 GHz quad-core Intel Clovertown (springfield.ftpn.ornl.gov)
  * Quad socket 2.2 GHz quad-core AMD Opteron Barcelona B3 (malaga.ornl.gov)
  * Dual socket 2.1 GHz quad-core AMD Opteron Barcelona B3 (madrid.ornl.gov)
  * Dual socket 2.6 GHz dual-core Intel Woodcrest (wc0[012].ornl.gov), connected with InfiniBand DDR HCAs and Myrinet 10GigE cards.
  * Dual socket 2.2 GHz dual-core AMD Opterons (dmz0[0123].ornl.gov)
  * A Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 server (olafsun.ftpn.ornl.gov) with one 1.165GHz UltraSPARC T2 processor.  This processor has eight cores, each with eight thread contexts; to the OS, this system appears to have 64 virtual processors. 


===== I/O Servers for Parallel Filesystem Development =====

  * Dual socket 2.3 GHz quad-core Intel Harpertown (iot0[1-5].ftpn.ornl.gov), with InfiniBand DDR+QDR and Chelsio 10GigE network 

===== Emerging Architectures =====

  * Two **Cell Broadband Engine** (CBE) blade systems with dual 2.4GHz Cell processors, each with a 64-bit Power Architecture PPE core and eight SPE SIMD cores. (cell0[01].ornl.gov)
  * Several variants of **GPU** accelerators, including double-precision capable boards from 
    * **NVIDIA Tesla** 10-series and
    * **AMD FireStream**.  
    * This includes several previous generation NVIDIA and AMD/ATI series boards.
    * (A CUDA development machine with NVIDIA 8600GT is available at athens.ornl.gov.)
  * An **AGEIA PhysX P1** PCI 128MB GDDR3 physics accelerator board.
  * Two **ClearSpeed Avalon** PCI boards, each capable of 100GF.
  * Three **Digilent Virtex-II Pro** FPGA Development System boards, with a variety of I/O ports, including USB and Ethernet.
  * A **Nallatech XtremeDSP** Development Kit with the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA and dual-channel high-performance ADCs and DACs.
  * Various simulators for advanced architectures
===== Infrastructure =====

  * A 4.5 TB **Panasas ActiveStore storage system** (one shelf, two Director Blades and nine Storage Blades) serving home directories and project areas for ExCL systems
  * A 500 GB RAID server with two dual-core Intel Xeons
  * An **InfiniBand network** consists of a 48-port DDR switch, 32 dual-port SDR HCAs and 8 dual-port DDR HCAs. The 31-node LNXI cluster is currently connected with the InifiniBand SDR HCAs. 
  * Two InfiniBand connectX QDR (quad data rate) HCAs
  * Two Myrinet 10-GigaBit EtherNet cards
  * Two Chelsio 10-GigaBit EtherNet cards


====== Retired Architectures ======

  * An **SRC-6C MAPstation** Reconfigurable Computing Platform pairing dual 2.8GHz Xeon processors with the Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA connected via DIMM slots.
  * An **ATI FireStream** 1GB PCIe GPU-based stream processing card.
  * Two **ClearSpeed CS-301** PCI boards, each with two Multi-Threaded Array Processors with 64 parallel execution units. 
  * An **Iwill H8501** server with 8 1.8GHz dual core Opteron processors with 32 GB of memory on a NUMA HT interconnect, configured as a 16-way SMP.
  * A 144 processor **Cray XD1** containing 2.2GHz Opteron processors with six of these nodes containing a **Virtex-II Pro FPGA** connected to a pair of Opterons via HyperTransport.