As part of its charter to advance the application of high performance computing through computational techniques and technologies, the CCT has deployed a facility to develop, test, evaluate, and apply emerging components and subsystems. The Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory or "ACAL" provides an environment, tool set, and staff dedicated to this important aspect of the CCT mission and service responsibility to LSU. The new capabilities incorporated within ACAL provides an entirely new dimension to CCT work and contributions to the field and the community it supports. The goal of CCT ACAL is to establish a facility enabling the investigation, evaluation, and application of advanced hardware and supporting software technologies for high performance computing systems and end user computation to achieve significant performance advantage through emerging technology opportunities.

The objectives of the establishment of ACAL are to achieve a near term capability to support on-going research that demands a hardware environment here at CCT and to enable innovative research at the hardware/software boundary for the advancement of applied high performance computing at LSU.

ACAL has been established in Room 318 Johnston Hall, acquire and install the basic testbed equipment required to perform experiments with existing commercial heterogeneous computing components to develop means and evaluate potential capabilities of exploiting heterogeneous computing structures for real world applications. It includes two medium scale testbeds for performing experiments with state-of-the-art hardware and software in the areas of hardware design and evaluation, system software techniques, and advanced computational methodologies for user algorithms and applications. The Reconfigurable Testbed allows rapid structuring of a 5 node cluster with a choice of 4 networks, several accelerators, and 2 types of FPGA components. The GPU Testbed (under development) provides 9 nodes combined with 4 NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerator units. Additional work-benches and digital test equipment are provided for a full professional working environment to support multiple students, researchers, and research groups to rapidly and efficiently perform detailed experiments