Research Centers & Facilities
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High Performance computing
Supercomputing Research Laboratories
ECE Supercomputing Research Laboratories (SRL) is a center where cutting-edge research in high-performance computing is conducted. Students, staff and faculty at SRL are interested in both hardware and software topics in the field of supercomputing. These topics range from computer architecture and design, parallel processing, programming models, system software, compiler and runtime technology, and applications.
Research & Development conducted in SRL has received generous support from federal and state organizations (e.g. DOE, DOD, NSF, DARPA, etc.) as well as some well established companies (IBM, HP, Intel etc.). Moreover, joint research activities are conducted with some premier national research institutions such as Caltech, Cornell University, JPL, ANL, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, etc.
There is several unique, state-of-the-art equipment and facilities available for students to conduct their experimentation as listed below:
- A supercomputer emulation engine – nick-named Mrs. Clops.
Jointly designed and constructed by IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and CAPSL group at ECE. A Mrs. Clops unit is itself a supercomputer consisting of 30 state-of-the-art FPGA chips and associated storage and other resources. It is constructed to emulate supercomputing engines made of chips/systems based on next generation large-scale multi-core chip technology. When operating at full speed, a Mrs. Clops unit can emulate - at gate-level - a 160-core IBM Cyclops-64 chip (which is close to ½ billion transistors on chip) at 1,000,000 cycles per second! This unprecedented power is expected to have a great impact in the chip design methodology. - An advanced experimental facility for reconfigurable supercomputing.
This includes two State-of-the-Art FPGA based research workstations from the leading industry vendors in this field: the XD1000 from XtremeData Incorporated and the DS1000 from DRC Computer. Researchers and students at ECE are conducting research using these equipment and making record-breaking speedup on key applications in the field of bioinformatics [ PDF ]
