CAD and Visualization Laboratory

The CAD and Visualization Laboratory or CVL is a computer lab running mainly CentOS machines maintained by the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. It is located in 432 Whittemore Hall. Access is through a keypad, the number to which can be obtained through official channels from ECE systems administrator Branden McKagen. Disk quotas are enforced when home folders become unreasonably large, unless you have a good reason to need the space. The CVL cluster is available via ssh to account holders on cvl.ece.vt.edu and has MPI, MATLAB, Cadence, and other software installed.

Virginia Tech users can obtain a central authentication account for all CVL machines using the automated account creation tool.

Physical Resources in the CVL

The lab in 432 Whittemore Hall contains:

• 9 workstations (cvlwsXX.ece.vt.edu), most of which have CentOS, Core 2 Duo, 4 GB memory, and dual monitors
• A printer available at socket://172.16.12.1 (only accessible from machines behind the CVL router). This uses the Dell M5210 Foomatic/Postscript driver, which is available in /software/Dell_5210n.ppd on CVL machines.
• A microscope
• A large-format Epson 9800 printer for research groups to print posters and CAD drawings (located offsite, follow the posted instructions for usage).

Compute Clusters

• 15 14-node old cluster
  • Each has Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHz CPUs, 8 GBytes RAM, 1 Gbit/sec ethernet
  • Remote access available through ssh to cvl.ece.vt.edu. Individual nodes are cvlXX.ece.vt.edu
  • MPI is installed, qsub can be used to parallelize things
  • X11 is also installed, so ssh -X cvl.ece.vt.edu can be used to remotely run GUI applications.
• 32 31-node blade cluster
  • 16 nodes with 2x Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2350 2GHz, 20 GBytes RAM, 1 Gbit/sec ethernet (cluster[01-16])
  • 16 nodes with 2x Quad-Core (8 threads) Intel(R) Xeon Processor E5620 2.40 GHz, 24 GBytes RAM, 1Gbit/sec ethernet (cluster[17-32])
  • This cluster does not have global IPv4 addresses, so you must ssh into other machines first to access this.
• Both clusters use a shared file storage system and central authentication, so home directories will persist between nodes.
• Lots of software is installed on the CVL machines.

For larger jobs, the Advanced Research Computing machines may be more appropriate.

Colocated Servers

The CVL is also home to the following:

• prometheus.ece.vt.edu, an off-the-shelf parallel computing cluster
• VTLUUG servers, including wood (a VM host) and sunway (a 19-node Pentium 4 cluster)

CVL Power

The CVL currently has 15 20A circuits and can provide a total of 100A triple-phase 220V power fed from panel LV4G (the transformer is rated for less than that though).

• Near-side wall (with window into hallway)
  • Circuit 8: Used for workstations
  • Circuit 10: Used for workstations and the CVL printer
  • Circuit 12: Used for workstations
• Left-side wall (with non-functional door into hallway)
  • Circuit 1: Unused
  • Circuit 3: Used for Poweredge 2900s (bottom PSU) and workstations
  • Circuit 5: Used for workstations
• Far-side wall (has window into power lab)
  • Circuit 7
    • CVL powerstrip #6 - CVL nodes 5, 6, 7, 8
    • VTLUUG powerstrip S1 - wood, mirror, mirror2, temp88191
  • Circuit 9
    • Prometheus PDU
      • Prometheus nodes 3-4
      • VTLUUG powerstrip C2 - Sunway nodes 1-4
    • VTLUUG powerstrip C1 - Sunway nodes 12-17, 48-port switch
    • CVL powerstrip #8 - CVL 9, 10, 11, 12
  • Circuit 11:
    • Prometheus head-node powerstrip
    • CVL powerstrip #16 - CVL nodes 13, 14, 15
    • CVL switch
    • CVL powerstrip #6 - CVL 1, 2, 3, 4, other CVL switch
• Right-side wall
  • Circuit 2
    • VTLUUG powerstrip S2 - temp88191, tardis, 8-port switch
    • VTLUUG Rack 1 PDU - monitor, KVM switch, akhaten
  • Circuit 4: Used for workstations
  • Circuit 6
    • VTLUUG powerstrip C3 - Sunway 5-11
• Floor
  • Circuit 14: Prometheus nodes 1-2
  • Circuit 16: Stuff on middle desk - Poweredge 2900s, RAID boxes, Powerconnect 5524, etc
  • Circuit 18: ???
• Circuits 15, 17, and 19 are not connected to outlets

External Links

• Description of the CVL
• Automated account creation
• Installed software