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Amsterdam Lighthouse
Amsterdam LightHouse is a joint research lab created by the Universiteit van Amsterdam and SARA.
Goals
Amsterdam Lighthouse was created in September 2004, and is destined to be used as a full-blown research lab for network research. In particularly it will be used as an OptIPuter node, for collaborations with OptIPuter partners like UCSD and UIC. Also, it will be used for demonstrations within the VL-e project.
More down to earth goals are:
- Create a demonstration facility, which allows us create permananent demonstrations with actual hihg-performance networks, which we can show to visitors.
- Create a workplace for students where they can get hands-on experience with live equipment, without giving them access to NetherLight. NetherLight is a more and more turning into a production facility, requiring strict access restrictions, which we would like to avoid for students in our group.
- Create a very flexible testbed, were devices can be connected without prior planning. Unlike a co-location, where equipment must fit neatly into the racks, we can now put a machine on a desk, plug in a fiber connection, and get some tests rolling.
Current equipment
The Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) has currently available at the Amsterdam Lighthouse:
- Speculaas, a Glimmerglass photonic cross connect, allowing us to have a very dynamic, but still remotely controllable, research network.
- A Force10 switch, which allows us to aggregate and convert traffic. The Force10 has currently six 10 Gigabit/s ethernet interfaces, two of which (the WAN PHY interfaces) are directly connected to a Nortel HDXc, which is the core of NetherLight. This gives us unprecedented high speed connections to the rest of the world, whilst still maintaining flexibility.
- The Rembrandt cluster, a 9-node dual Opteron cluster. Each node has a RAID disk as well, giving 6 TeraByte of disk space (and we plan to extend it to 16 TeraByte soon). Also, most nodes are equipped with 10 Gb/s network cards for throughput experiments. Last, each node has 8x speed AGP slots, allowing us to use them for visualization experiments.
SARA, the Academic Computing Center, has currently available at the Amsterdam Lighthouse:
- A 4 by 4 tile display, connected to consumer-priced rendering nodes. Not only does it look impressive, but it shows that with relative easy cost it is possible to vizualise large data set using a tile display.
- A seperate computing cluster for rendering images for the tile display.
More information
See for more information:
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