Screenshot of PSE visualization software.
Microarchitecture Lab
David M. Koppelman
A collection of computers
for research on microarchitecture.
Room 150F EE Building
Lab Highlights
- A 100-core GPU accelerated cluster.
- A novel cluster of three vastly different implementations of same instruction set (ISA).
- Funded by multiple BoR grants.
- Facilities for research and education.
The Computer Microarchitecture Research Lab consists of a collection
of machines used for computer architecture research. The machines are
housed in Room 150F EE Building, a raised-floor machine room, and are
accessible from Internet. The lab consists of a novel specialized
system for multithreading and computer architecture comparative
studies, and a 10-node GPU-accelerated cluster for running
simulations.
The lab's most novel system is a single-ISA, three-implementation
system, which consists of machines of very different design but
sharing the same machine language and were designed at roughly the
same time. The three machines are a Fujitsu M5000 (SPARC 64VI) named
dynasparc.ece.lsu.edu, Sun T5120 (UltraSPARC T2) named
bioctooris.ece.lsu.edu, and a Sun V490 (UltraSPARC IV) named
static.ece.lsu.edu. All of these are multithreaded machines
implementing SPARC V9 and as a set are an ideal platform to study the
impact of vastly different design decisions, decisions made at about
the same time and to implement the same language.
The workhorse machine is petal.ece.lsu.edu, a 100-core, 10-node Dell
cluster using Xeon E5560 and E5650 CPUs; five of the nodes are
equipped with Fermi-class GPUs. The machine is used for computer
architecture research and for some courses. The cluster runs
simulations of new computer designs, generating detailed datasets that
can drive visualizations needed to gain insights into performance
bottlenecks and unexploited potential, or to estimate the overall
performance of the designs.
Lab Equipment
- Fujitsu M5000 (SPARC 64VI) multiprocessor.
- Sun T5120 (UltraSPARC "Niagara" T2) many-core system.
- Sun V490 (UltraSPARC IV) multiprocessor.
- Dell cluster, including five 8-core CPU-only nodes and six GPU accelerated nodes.