This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing theresources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject andinvestigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source,and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed isfor the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator.We propose to develop a networked environment for the collaborative assembly,analysis, and sharing of a number of multi-terabyte datasets. We will test itseffectiveness by working with content providers who will use the system tobuild a large repository of important biological data, by having additionalcollaborators use the system to work on open research questions, and byobserving use of the system by the general scientific community. The system isapplicable to any area of research that involves collection and analysis oflarge image and volumetric datasets such as optical sections, CT, MRI, and EM.Its greatest value is with data that must be interactively shared by multipleusers, is too large for distribution as DVDs, and that must be used in 3Daligned form. The primary user interface, to access full system functionality,will be a platform independent (PC, Mac, Linux, UNIX) native mode clientprogram derived in part from the current PSC Volume Browser. It will providehighly interactive and dynamic performance by making use of acceleratedgraphics hardware features such as texture mapping, blending, coordinatetransforms and 3D shading called from OpenGL. Less graphically intensive accessto portions of the system will also be provided through conventional webbrowsers. The processes needed to co-register large numbers of serial sectionsand to recognize 3D structures are computationally and memory intensive.CASCADE will handle the majority of the collaboratory interactions. Weestablished SuperWorm (www.superworm.org), a confluence of two software groups(PSC's Biomedical Initiative; Spring, Pitt), two content generating researchers(Hall, AECOM; Fetter, UCSF) and five beta-test researchers plus an experiencedsoftware evaluator (Gadd, Pitt). This group will develop and integrate toolsfor collaboration, visualization, analysis, high speed networking andsupercomputing into a single working environment to enable effectivedistributed collaborations and to support the wide-spread sharing of expensiveand voluminous (multi-terabyte datasets) TEM datasets.
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