On this page:
14.1 Base-station resources
14.2 Dense-deployment Base-station resources
14.3 Fixed-endpoint resources
14.4 Mobile-endpoint resources
14.5 Skylark IRIS Endpoints
14.6 Near-edge computing resources
14.7 Cloud computing resources
2024-01-04 (93db12d)

14 Hardware

14.1 Base-station resources

Each Powder base station site includes a collection of software defined radio devices from National Instruments (NI) connected to Commscope and Keysight antennas. A handful of sites (one now, and three later) include massive MIMO equipment from Skylark Wireless. Each device has one or more dedicated 10G links to aggregation switches at the Fort Douglas aggregation point. These network connections can be flexibly paired with compute at the aggregation point or slightly further upstream with Emulab/CloudLab resources.

14.2 Dense-deployment Base-station resources

Each Powder dense deployment base station location contains an NI B210 SDR connected to a Commscope antenna and a small compute node connected via fiber to the Fort Douglas aggregation point.

The compute node is connected via two 1Gbps connections to a local switch which in turn uplinks via 10Gb fiber to the Fort datacenter. The two connections are:

The two S5248F-ON switches are connected to a third S5248F-ON "aggregation" switch via 2 x 100GbE links each. All three switches host 10Gb connections from the eight roof-top base-stations. The aggregation switch also hosts 100Gb uplinks to the MEB and DDC datacenters that contain further Powder resources and uplinks to Emulab and CloudLab.

14.3 Fixed-endpoint resources

Each Fixed Endpoint (FE) installation in POWDER contains an ensemble of software defined radio (SDR) equipment from National Instruments (NI) with complementary small form factor compute nodes. There is no wired backhaul, though the platform does provide seamless access via cellular/WiFi to resources in an FE installation. Endpoints are mounted at human height level on the sides of buildings.

14.4 Mobile-endpoint resources

Each Mobile Endpoint (ME) installation in Powder contains two software defined radio (SDR) units from National Instruments (NI) with one small form factor compute node. As with fixed-endpoints, there is no wired backhaul, though the platform does provide seamless access via cellular/WiFi to resources in an ME installation. Endpoints are mounted inside of campus shuttle buses on a rear shelf with antennas attached to a rear window.

14.5 Skylark IRIS Endpoints

Skylark IRIS SDRs are deployed as endpoints in two eastern facing offices of the Merrill Engineering Building. These are connected via 1 Gbps copper links.

14.6 Near-edge computing resources

The following resources are connected to the Powder base-stations via 100Gb links in an aggregation point at the Fort Douglas datacenter.

d740

   

16 nodes (Skylake, 24 cores)

CPU

   

2 x Xeon Gold 6126 processors (12 cores, 2.6Ghz)

RAM

   

96GB Memory (12 x 8GB RDIMMs, 2.67MT/s)

Disks

   

2 x 240GB SATA 6Gbps SSD Drives

NIC

   

10GbE Dual port embedded NIC (Intel X710)

NIC

   

10GbE Dual port converged NIC (Intel X710)

d840

   

3 nodes (Skylake, 64 cores)

CPU

   

4 x Xeon Gold 6130 processors (16 cores, 2.1Ghz)

RAM

   

768GB Memory (24 x 32GB RDIMMs, 2.67MT/s)

Disks

   

240GB SATA 6Gbps SSD Drive

Disks

   

4 x 1.6TB NVMe SSD Drive

NIC

   

10GbE Dual port embedded NIC (Intel X710)

NIC

   

40GbE Dual port converged NIC (Intel XL710)

All nodes are connected to two networks:

The two S5248F-ON switches are connected to a third S5248F-ON "aggregation" switch via 2 x 100GbE links each. All three switches host 10Gb connections from the eight roof-top base-stations. The aggregation switch also hosts 100Gb uplinks to the MEB and DDC datacenters that contain further Powder resources and uplinks to Emulab and CloudLab.

14.7 Cloud computing resources

In addition, Powder can allocate bare-metal computing resources on any one of several federated clusters, including CloudLab and Emulab.