Researchers at eight U.S. universities are collaborating in the development of Archer, a community-based computing infrastructure for computer architecture research and education. Archer addresses, in an integrated manner, computer architecture researchers' broad need to access powerful computational resources and share simulation environments. The project achieves this objective by deploying a large-scale, flexible, and easy-to-use computing infrastructure which adds users' local computing resources to Archer-dedicated resources as users join the network, thereby increasing Archer's computing power as more users join. In addition, the Archer project comprehends a repository where users can share tools and simulation environments they've created, adding another incentive for users to join the Archer community, facilitating collaboration among research groups, and advancing the field of computer architecture.
The core hardware of Archer consists of computer clusters to be deployed at Cornell University, Florida State U., Northeastern U., Northwestern U., U. FLorida, U. Minnesota, and U. Texas at Austin. The hardware infrastructure provides hundreds of processors to support the demanding simulation workloads required by computer architecture research in areas including soft-error modeling, statistically-based design exploration, and chip-multiprocessor micro-architectures. The key software technologies enabling community resources to be aggregated in a secure, scalable and seamless manner are resource virtualization and robust batch job scheduling, which include the IPOP virtual network from U. Florida and the Condor middleware from U. Wisconsin.
The Archer community resource will enable advances in computer architecture by allowing researchers, particularly those in institutions not equipped with local resources for high-throughput computing, to run large-scale simulation experiments. Its technology provides a new way to swiftly create ad-hoc shared "Grid" computing pools within or across institutions, which will pave the way to the creation of similar cyberinfrastructures for other communities.
