We are located in the basement of the Hedco Neuroscience Building, on the USC University Park Campus in downtown Los Angeles. To come to USC, take the 110 freeway, and exit on Exposition Blvd, a couple of miles South of the intersection between the 110 and 10 freeways. Then follow the directions on this map. Beware that parking costs $6 unless you have made previous arrangements with us to have a parking permit reserved for you at the campus entrance gate. You may also want to check these official USC maps and driving directions. Prof. Itti's office is in Room 30A, and the laboratory and student offices are in Rooms 6 and 28D. Our 16-node Beowulf computer cluster is generously hosted by Prof. Arbib in Room 10. |  |
 | In
October 2000, we installed a new high-performance Linux computing
cluster: 16 nodes @ 733MHz plus one dual-CPU 733MHz console and one
single-CPU 700MHz console, 4.5 GB total RAM, 1/2 TB total disk, 3 x
100Mbps network. The three Fast Ethernet boards in each node are
connected to three separate 24-port Fast Ethernet switches, and we use
Ethernet channel bonding under Linux to make the three separate
networks work as if they were a single "fat" channel. We have
benchmarked sustained TCP transfer rates under normal use conditions
(multi-user runlevel, many system services running) approaching 250
Mbps and are really happy with the overall performance of the
cluster.
This cluster is used for research on vision algorithms which demand high amounts of processing power, especially if one wants to run them in real-time. The fast network between the nodes allows us to process streaming video sequences over the entire distributed system of 16 nodes in real time. See our Beowulf Page for details and screenshots. |
| Powerfile Corp. graciously donated a great 200-slot DVD-RAM jukebox to iLab, which we use to automate backups from the various computers in the lab. We wrote Linux drivers for the baby, and a simple automated archival application which stores in a PostgreSQL database information about the various archived files, for easy retrieval. With a total capacity of nearly 1 Terabyte, it will take some time until all disks are full! |  |
| Our lab has recently been equipped for robotics and electronics research, in paritcular around the Beobot Project. The facilities include an assortment of hand tools, oscilloscope, multimeters, soldering iron, lab power supplies, various batteries and chargers, precision drill, and miscellaneous electronics and mechanical parts. In addition, two Linux PCs (one of which is a fast dual-CPU machine) are available in the Beobot lab for software development and testing. The Beobot lab is located in room HNB-30A. |
| The USC Neuroscience Graduate Program (NGP) acquired an eye-tracking device which is hosted in room HNB-13b. The video-based 240Hz tracker allows for recording of eye position while human subjects observe a variety of visual stimuli. This system is used to investigate human visual processing at the sub-conscious and conscious levels. See the NGP Eye-Tracker Home Page for additional information. |
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Copyright © 2000 by the University of Southern California, iLab and Prof. Laurent Itti
