The Security Analysis and Information Assurance Laboratory (SAIAL), a $1.5 million state-of-the-art laboratory, gives UTD the ability to conduct cyber security education and research, and greatly enhances our ability to collaborate with other universities and corporations doing leading-edge research in this critically important area. Founded in 2004, the SAIAL Lab is a major facility that faculty use for research as well as education. The lab consists of three separate rooms each individually tested to meet MIL-STD-285 TEMPEST standards. This lab is used primarily for Cloud Computing and Digital Forensics research projects. Some of the projects currently underway are “Continuous query processing in large-scale social networks using a cloud infrastructure” and “Storage and Retrieval of Large RDF graphs using Hadoop and MapReduce”.
Equipment: This laboratory has substantial hardware to support our research. The hardware we have at present includes four major clusters having different configurations.
The first cluster is very small in size and is generally used as our test cluster. It consists of 4 nodes. Each node has a Pentium-IV processor with an 80GB hard drive and 1GB of main memory. We use sample data in this cluster to test our code and carry out various optimization algorithms. This cluster is located in the Semantic Web laboratory.
The second cluster is placed in the SAIAL (Security Analysis and Information Assurance Lab with lab support) and has a total of 23 nodes. All the nodes in this cluster run on commodity class hardware on which Hadoop runs as well. This 23 node cluster has a mixed collection of hardware: 8 nodes have a Pentium-IV processor with 360GB of hard disk space and 4GB of main memory in each of them. The remaining 15 nodes also have a Pentium-IV processor with about 290GB of hard disk space and 4 GB of main memory in each.
The third cluster is also placed in the SAIAL lab and consists of 10 nodes. Each node in this cluster has a Pentium-IV processor with 500GB of disk space and 4GB main memory. All these nodes are connected to each other via a 48-port Cisco switch on an internal network. Only the master node is accessible from the public network on each cluster.
The fourth cluster to which we have access is the Open Cirrus testbed infrastructure from HP Labs. We can use up to 30 nodes from their testbed. Each node has a high-end configuration like a Quad Core Processor with 8GB of main memory and more than 1TB of hard disk space. We also have 2 solid state disks that will be incorporated into the already existing clusters.
Location: ECSS 4.101