The Innovative Systems Lab deploys, manages, and evaluates emerging hardware and software systems of interest to the NCSA and UIUC scientific computing community. This includes new processor architectures, memory, storage, and interconnect technologies as well as HPC and cloud system architectures. The overarching goals of such evaluations include:

• Developing an understanding of emerging technologies and their capabilities.
• Developing an understanding of technology needs for future scientific computing projects and initiatives.
• Improving the performance and usability of current and future compute- and data-intensive platforms.
• Investigating alternative computer architectures that could benefit scientific computing community beyond mainstream technologies.

To achieve these goals, the Innovative Systems Lab:

• Maintains, manages, and provides access to a number of hardware and software environments for testing and evaluation.
• Keeps track of emerging processor, memory, storage, interconnect, and systems architecture trends.
• Engages with technology vendors to learn about and evaluate their future products.
• Engages in joint research to develop and evaluate new technologies, tools, and techniques.
• Provides application development support on the emerging architectures.
• Publishes technology review and evaluation reports for the NCSA research community.