US National Foundation for Functional Brain Imaging invests in Linux cluster

 Mountain View 09 May 00 The US National Foundation for Functional Brain Imaging (NFFBI) has invested in a 32-processor compute cluster based on the SGI 1400L server running Linux. NFFBI, headquartered in Albuquerque, NM, is a research partnership with Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital, University Of Minnesota School Of Medicine and New Mexico science and technical institutions such as the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque VA Medical Center, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The system installed at NFFBI consists of eight SGI 1400L servers, each equipped with four Intel Pentium III Xeon processors.

The goal of NFFBI is to improve understanding of mental illness through the application of advanced functional brain imaging techniques. The foundation invests in basic research, clinical research and technology development in the areas of mental illness, cognitive neuroscience and cognitive disorders, as well as instrumentation, analysis and modelling for functional brain imaging.

Software includes Linux, SGI ProPack software overlay for improved performance and reliability and the SGI Linux Advanced Cluster Environment to ease cluster management and enhance cluster performance.

The foundation and its partners have demanding computing needs that originate in the sheer quantity of data generated by functional brain imaging techniques and by the need for advanced analysis, modelling and simulation to derive the needed results. One of the important technical goals of foundation researchers is to combine data from functional magnetic resonance imaging and magnetoencephalography into a four-dimensional (three spatial dimensions plus time) representation of activity in the brain. The resulting spatial-temporal patterns of activity will help to provide a more detailed understanding of both normal brain function and functional abnormalities associated with mental disorders.

The foundation focused on cost-effectiveness and reliable technical support in selecting its computing hardware vendor. "Without the personnel and technical resources to build a Beowulf system from scratch", said Christner, NFFBI system administrator, "it was essential to have SGI's experience and expertise behind us. My experience with SGI has always been extremely favourable. SGI technical support teams have been excellent on this project."

 

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