Visual Analytics Sandbox is a experimental environment for streaming big data analysis. The sandbox is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Initiative (MRI) award to the Informatics Research Institute.

The Sandbox is equipped with the state of the art hardware that enables researchers to build solutions to big data problems. The sandbox cluster consists of 11 nodes, equipped with Intel Xeon E5 – 2690 processors, P100 GPUs, and NVMe SSDs. The cluster consists of 308 cores, 2.5 TB of RAM, 25 TB of NVMe SSD, 8 Nvdia Tesla P100 GPUs, and Nvdia Quadro P6000 GPU for visualization. In total, the cluster has a theoretical computation capacity of 125 TFLOPs.

The sandbox environment also includes OpenStack Sahara to provision data-intensive application cluster and Cloudera environment to execute large scale analytic applications.