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The Computational and Information Sciences Directorate has formed Advanced Computing Technology Laboratory (ACTL), a virtual research laboratory to investigate and evaluate key technology components and emerging high-end systems for data-intensive computing. The ACTL is primarily housed within the EMSL and began operations in January 2005. PNNL Fellow and CSM Chief Scientist for High Performance Computing, Jarek Nieplocha, is the director for this new laboratory and Kevin Regimbal, Director for the Molecular Sciences Computing Facility Operations, is deputy director of ACTL. Andres Marques, a new staff member in the Applied Computer Science group, will be leading computer architecture research and TP Straatsma will provide guidance on bioinformatics applications. The new laboratory includes two SGI Altix supercomputers, a Cray XD1, a storage system for bioinformatics research, a colony2a testbed with advanced interconnects, and a 64-CPU IBM Power-5 server. The technologies available within ACTL are the FPGA, GRAPE boards for acceleration molecular dynamics calculations, latest Infiniband and Myrinet networks, and evaporative cooling provided by ISR under funding from DoE/NNSA.

New experimental system was delivered and installed by SGI in ACTL. This system represents a hybrid architecture composed of the SGI Altix 350 and Xilinx http://www.xilinx.com Virtex FPGA board. The system will support research on reconfigurable computing in data-intensive applications, primarily in the areas of bioinformatics and power systems. Daniel Chavaria, who recently joined the Applied Computer Science group from Rice University, and David Chassin of Computational Mathematics/CSM have initiated research on deploying the new system for data-intensive computing.