A sandbox is a small, isolated testbed environment — typically two nodes plus a console — that you can reserve without affecting the main testbeds (BED, Grid). Each sandbox is differentiated by the kind of radios, attenuators, FPGAs, GPUs, or other hardware it carries. Sandboxes are the right place to develop and debug experiment scripts and disk images before scaling up.
| Sandbox | Node type | Specialisation |
|---|---|---|
| SB4 | LV-67G + Q87T | Attenuator-matrix-based topologies, Atheros 9K, WiMAX |
| SB5 | Q87T | (formerly sb1.orbit) USRP B210, Atheros 9K, Intel Wireless N + WiMAX |
| SB6 | Q87T | (formerly sb2.orbit) USRP X310, Atheros 9K, Intel Wireless N + WiMAX. First sandbox with data2 plane (10.9.6.0/24). |
| SB7 | LV-67C | (formerly sb3.orbit) USRP2, Atheros 5K — legacy USRP2 development |
| SB9 | Dell PowerEdge R740 (×8) | Wired-only — programmable-NIC + FPGA + GPU sandbox. Per server: dual Intel Xeon Gold 6126 (24 cores / 48 threads), 192 GB DDR4-2666 (24× DIMMs), Samsung SATA SSD (~223 GB), 6× Mellanox ConnectX-5 (25 GbE active), NVIDIA Tesla V100 16 GB, Xilinx Alveo U200 XDMA + Xilinx SmartSSD + dual NetFPGA-style Ethernet controllers. BMC: Dell iDRAC, BIOS 2.25.0. |
Domain migration in progress (2026). The legacy
orbit-lab.orgsandboxes are being renamed and renumbered into thecosmos-lab.orgnamespace. Completed: sb1.orbit → sb5.cosmos (Wave 4), sb2.orbit → sb6.cosmos (Wave 5), sb3.orbit → sb7.cosmos (Wave 1), sb9.orbit → sb9.cosmos (Wave 6). sb4.orbit will follow in a subsequent wave. The original first-generation ORBIT SB5, SB6, SB7, and SB8 hardware was retired years ago and is unrelated to the new cosmos-named sandboxes — those names are now reused for the renamed sandboxes above.
These sandboxes carry the cosmos-lab.org domain in their hostname and
are managed as part of the COSMOS portal, but they live in two
locations:
| Sandbox | Where | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| sb1.cosmos | NJ (WINLAB, Route 1) | Indoor mmWave / COSMOS development sandbox in the same building as the legacy ORBIT sandboxes; not a NYC rooftop. |
| sb2.cosmos | NYC (Columbia) | Auden / Columbia indoor sandbox. |
| sb5.cosmos | NJ (WINLAB, Route 1) | Q87T USRP B210 / Atheros 9K / Intel N + WiMAX — was sb1.orbit before the 2026 rename. |
| sb6.cosmos | NJ (WINLAB, Route 1) | Q87T USRP X310 / Atheros 9K / Intel N + WiMAX — was sb2.orbit before the 2026 rename. First sandbox on the new data2 plane. |
| sb7.cosmos | NJ (WINLAB, Route 1) | LV-67C USRP2 / Atheros 5K — was sb3.orbit before the 2026 rename. |
instrument.cosmos |
NYC (CCNY) | Indoor instrument-grade lab adjacent to BED. |
| If your experiment needs… | Try |
|---|---|
| RF in a controlled, repeatable channel (no over-the-air variability) | SB4 (attenuator matrix) |
| A USRP B210 (USB) | SB5 (was sb1.orbit) |
| A USRP X310 (10 G) | SB6 (was sb2.orbit) |
| A wired-only OpenFlow / NetFPGA / programmable-NIC setup with GPU and high-speed (25/100 GbE) interconnect | SB9 |
| A baseline “1 USRP + WiFi” sanity check | SB5, SB6, or SB7 |
| 28 GHz mmWave / O-RAN / PAAM | sb1.cosmos (NJ) or sb2.cosmos (NYC), or BED for full rooftop deployment |
| Experimenting with a 3-plane (control + data1 + data2) network topology | SB6 (the first sandbox-class testbed with data2 plane) |
If unsure, start on SB5 or SB6 — both are general-purpose, two-node sandboxes that mirror the most common single-link USRP+WiFi topology.
Original ORBIT sandbox-vs-hardware mapping, preserved for historical
reference. Names in bold are the new cosmos-lab.org names where
the sandbox has been renamed; names in italic are physically retired
first-generation ORBIT hardware that is unrelated to the renamed
sandboxes.
| ORBIT name | Status | Node Type | Specialisation | Current name |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| sb1.orbit | renamed | Q87T | USRP B210, Atheros 9K, Intel Wireless N + WiMAX | sb5.cosmos |
| sb2.orbit | renamed | Q87T | USRP X310, Atheros 9K, Intel Wireless N + WiMAX | sb6.cosmos |
| sb3.orbit | renamed | LV-67C | USRP2, Atheros 5K | sb7.cosmos |
| sb4.orbit | active | LV-67G, Q87T | Attenuator-based topologies, Atheros 9K, WiMAX | sb4.orbit (Wave 2 pending) |
| (orig.) SB5 | retired (old hardware) | LV-67C | USRP, Atheros 9K | — |
| (orig.) SB6 | retired | LV-67C | CR-Kit (Zynq SDR), WARP, Intel devices, WiMAX | — |
| (orig.) SB7 | retired (old hardware) | LV-67G | USRP2, Atheros 9K, ZigBee, WiMAX | — |
| (orig.) SB8 | retired | LV-67C | Atheros 9K, WiMAX | — |
| sb9.orbit | renamed | Dell R740 (×8) | dual Xeon Gold 6126 / 192 GB DDR4 / V100 / Mellanox CX-5 25 GbE / Xilinx Alveo U200 + SmartSSD + NetFPGA-style | sb9.cosmos |