Laboratory Facilities at LEMS
The main computational facility for LEMS is a network
of more than 20 workstations ranging from ancient sun4c's (now used
as X-terminals) to
more modern Sun Sparc10's, Sparc20 and UltraSparc's, SGI Indigo
2's and O2's, and 266 MHz Pentium II PC's.
There is currently more than 50 gigabytes of
disk storage shared among these workstations.
Input/output devices at LEMS include CDROM drives, laser printers, exabyte and
DAT tape drives, document scanners, video cameras and video capture boards.
A generous equipment grant from the Hewlett Packard
Company has provided LEMS with state-of-the-art
instrumentation and test equipment to design, develop and debug their
hardware projects. This equipment (digital oscilloscopes, logic analysers,
communication test equipment, and waveform analysers) has been essential in
the design of computing systems at LEMS.
In addition to the commercial computer equipment listed above LEMS is home
to a variety of custom built hardware.
- LEMS is home to the Armstrong family of loosely coupled multiprocessor systems.
Armstrong I was built in 1988 and comprised 68 nodes. Each node was based on a
Motorola 68010 processor. Armstrong II nodes contained a pair of 68020 processors.
The current generation, Armstrong III, employs an AMD 29000 processor for computation
and a 68020 for communications processing. Armstrong III also contains a
reconfigurable hardware element (FPGA) closely coupled to the main processor.
- The microphone-array group uses custom built multichannel data acquisition
hardware. Microphone-Array III is a 16 channel, 20kHz, 12 bit A/D system for
multichannel sound capture. Microphone-Array IV can make digital recordings of
up to 128 20kHz channels.
- Also under development for the microphone-array effort under an NSF grant is the HMA,
An acquisition and processing workstation capable of processing digital data
from 512 microphones simultaneously. This project is in partnership with the CAIP
laboratory at Rutgers University.
www@lems.brown.edu
Last modified: Wed Feb 18 17:47:35 EST 1998