The Distributed Systems Section (DSS) of the Computer Systems Laboratory and the Laboratory Systems Unit (LSU) of the Computer Center Branch are working jointly on a project to provide support for researchers with high- performance UNIX workstations manufactured by a variety of vendors. The workstations are interconnected by the NIH campus-wide LAN, by which they share resources and access services such as file backup and archiving, software maintenance, applications software, online documentation, nationwide electronic mail and news, computation and database servers, laser printers, and a national distributed file system. Applications for Advanced Laboratory Workstations (ALWs) include molecular graphics and modeling, medical image processing, searching, statistical analysis, laboratory data acquisition, and desktop publishing. Use of ALW systems grew to about 150 workstations and over 300 registered users in the following ICDs: CC, DCRT, NCI, NCRR, NIA, NIAID, NIAMS, NICHD, NIDCD, NIDDK, NIMH, NINDS, and NHLBI. Nine file servers support over 80GB of disk space. We have begun a collaboration with the NCRR and the DRRP on the Multimodality Radiological Image Processing System (MRIPS). MRIPS will enable NIH investigators to register and visualize 2D and 3D medical images acquired by various means. The ALW Project supports the UNIX workstations and AFS fileservers for this project. We continued collaborating with the NIA on an image processing project which involves using ALWs to perform two tasks: (1) registration of PET and MRI three dimensional images for the analysis of functional anatomy, and (2) rescaling of MRI images to the dimensions of a standard brain atlas. Other major users of ALW technology are the Biological Computation Facility (BCF) of RBMB, NINDS, the Laboratory of Chemical Physics and Laboratory of Molecular Biology, NIDDK, the CSL Computational Science and Engineering Section, and the Computer Networks Branch, DCRT.
