RCL Facilities

• Our Convey HC-2 system is a hybrid-core computer that allows users to build and implement solutions known as “Personalities” in C, C++, or Fortran. The Convey HC-2 interfaces an Intel Xeon processor, personalities, I/O, and virtual memory with an Intel chipset. The architecture of the system consists of the Intel-based server and Convey’s FPGA-based coprocessor, which is made up of an application engine hub, application engines, and its own memory. The Intel server’s MCH interfaces with the coprocessor’s Application Engine Hub. Personalities, which are reloadable instruction sets, are executable on either x86 nodes or Convey Hybrid-Core nodes. Both the host and coprocessor manage their own pools of memory, that can be migrated dynamically if need be.
• Our Dini DN8000K10 development platform is a Virtex-4 based ASIC prototyping engine. The DN8000K10 contains 16 Virtex-4 FPGAs which are used largely for logic emulation, including 2 FX100s and 14 LX100s. It can emulate the equivalent of 23.7M ASIC gates, with LVDS signalling between FPGAs on the board and four DDR2 SODIMMs that can support 4GB of DRAM each.
• Our NVIDIA Tesla S870 platform contains four 128-core G80 GPUs and has the equivalent of two teraflops of processing power. Each GPU has 1.5 GB of DDR3 memory dedicated to it. Each GPU on the Tesla S870 supports thousands of parallel threads and IEEE 754 single-precision floating point, and can communicate with each GPU as well as the host system via PCI-Express.
• Our XtremeData XD2000i development system is an FPGA-based in-socket accelerator that features three Altera Stratix III FPGAs, which provides Intel-based host system with up to reconfigurable 2,304 DSP blocks. One of the FPGAs is dedicated solely to acting as a bridge for system resources, freeing the other two solely for user applications. Acceleration of software applications is made possible on the XD2000i through parallelization and pipelining of computational tasks, and the fast Front-Side Bus connection to the host system.
• We also use a variety of other hardware and FPGA boards. Examples include Zedboard as well as the Xilinx ZCU-106 development boards. These pieces of hardware are unified standalone development platforms that can be used to explore digital design, embedded systems, computer architecture, and a variety of other disciplines. This hardware is currently connected to the RCL facility's remotely-accessible Linux stations, which interface via RS232 UART, USB JTAG, GigE, and DVI. Each board can also be remotely monitored via two webcams - one of the cameras points at the LEDs on the board so that the state of the LEDs can be remotely inspected, and the other camera points at each standalone monitor to verify visual output.