Facilities
Facilities
For projects involving high performance computing and graphics, the laboratory contains dozens of workstations equipped with cutting edge 3D accelerator cards running Linux and various versions of Windows.
Computational resources are provided by three clusters. The Chromium cluster consists of 32 machines with dual 800Mhz Intel processors, an aggregate 8GB of RAM, and .5 TB of storage interconnected via a high-speed Myrinet network. The Spire cluster features 16 rack-mounted machines with dual 2.4 GHz Xeon processors, 16GB of RAM, 1.2 TB of storage and an Infiniband interconnect. The Solver cluster features 19 rack-mounted SunFire V40z compute servers, each with 4 AMD Opteron 852 2.6Ghz processors and 32 GB of PC3200 DDR RAM. It is managed by two SunFire V20z management nodes, each with 2 AMD Opteron 248 2.2Ghz processors. Connectivity for the compute and management nodes is provided by dual Gigabit Ethernet connections. Centralized storage for the Solver cluster is provided through a multi-enclosure RAID subsystem utilizing 2Gb Fibre Channel interconnect. The Solver cluster includes a total of 80 CPUs (76 Model 852 and 4 Model 248), 616GB of RAM and a total of 20.2TB of storage space (14.4TB shared centralized Fibre Channel storage and 5.8TB of local SCSI Ultra320 storage). Three dual processor Xeon file servers, each with multi-terabyte RAID systems and connected via dual gigabit interfaces, provide networked storage for research projects.
To facilitate research in shape acquisition and computational imaging, we have a number of special-purpose input and output devices. These include a laser triangulation range scanner custom-built by Cyberware for scanning large statues, a smaller Cyberware Model 15 laser triangulation rangefinder, a 3D Scanners Ltd. handheld laser triangulation rangefinder, a Cyra time-of-flight laser rangefinder, two Faro digitizing articulated arms (Bronze and Silver Series), a unique two-armed, spherical gonioreflectometer, and a reconfigurable array of 128 custom CMOS-based cameras with supporting electronics. We share Motion capture facilities with the Stanford Neuromuscular Biomechanics Lab. These include a Motion Analysis Corp. system using 8 EAGLE-4 4MP CCD cameras able of full-frame capture at 200Hz and reduced-frame capture at up to 10Khz.
To support all our research projects, we have a variety of digital still and video cameras, several kinds of studio lighting rigs, an optical bench well-stocked with optical "tinkertoys". A small video lab permits video to be played, and edited across a number of analog and digital signal formats and media types. Finally, we can produce printed materials on a variety of small-to-large format color and B&W printers and an HP 3500 plotter.
The laboratory is managed by John Gerth. See Pat Hanrahan, Leo Guibas, Marc Levoy, or Ron Fedkiw for information about getting access to the lab.
The graphics laboratory was initially supported by a NSF CISE Research Infrastructure Grant entitled "High Performance Graphics and Imaging". Additional equipment support has been provided by Intel, nVIDIA, SGI, and Sony .