For high-performance computing and visualization, a group of 14 major users from the University of Minnesota is requesting funds towards the purchase of a 32-processor SGI Onyx 3800 with the Infinite Reality 3 Graphics engine, 64 GB of memory (2 GB per processor) and 1 TB of fibre channel RAID. These 14 major users have 13 NIH RO1-type research grants among them covering various areas in biomedical research: X-ray diffraction and NMR protein and nucleic acid structure determination (Banaszak, Levitt, Mayo, Ohlendorf), quantum mechanical calculations of enzyme systems (Barry, Gao, Truhlar, York), molecular dynamics simulations of muscle motion (Thomas) and biomolecular dynamics (Cramer, Mayo, Musier-Forsyth), and confocal (Wessendorf, Wilcox) and SEM (Erlandsen) microscopic imaging of cells and tissues. The proposed equipment will be housed in relatively new space of the Basic Sciences Computing Lab (BSCL) in the new Basic Sciences and Biomedical Engineering building on the west bank campus of the University of Minnesota. Although considerable computational technical expertise is available at the BSCL, computing resources currently offered comprise eleven SGI workstations (seven of which are more than two years old) and three two-year-old four-processor compute servers. This instrumentation is inadequate to meet the computing needs of the proposed research projects and does not provide the high-end graphics capability required by participating NlH-funded researchers. The proposed equipment will provide computing and graphics capabilities that are currently unavailable at the BSCL.
