This proposal requests support for a parallel superscalar processing system to enhance ongoing NMR research activities of PHS-supported investigators at the MGH. Current and proposed research investigations demand increasingly complex data manipulations for information extraction from constantly growing data acquisitions. This assumes critical importance with the availability of real time (echo planar) imaging with an image acquisition rate of 1/30th of a second. Although we have invested substantial efforts in supporting these needs on Sun 4 workstations, the demands of the fast acquisition technology and new complex image processing tasks require a parallel computing capability which the current equipment cannot support. While parallel computing resources are available to the MGH research community, available time is limited and network access prohibits utilization of those resources for image analysis. This proposal documents nine biomedical research projects which will be significantly enhanced using the requested hardware. While this group of NMR projects has a broad range of interests, there are two unifying themes: 1) projects producing massive data sets including time series functional studies of brain (#1) and myocardial (#2) perfusion and whole body detection of bone marrow disease (#3), atheroma (#4) and lymph node metastases (#5); and 2) computationally intense projects including brain perfusion (#1), atheroma characterization (#4), quantitation of intracerebral hemorrhage (#6), cardiac function assessment with myocardial tags (#7), morphometric neuroimaging (#8), and P31 in bone mineralization (#9). The proposed equipment will be a resource to the community of PHS-supported biomedical researchers at the MGH. The system will be managed by the Internal Advisory Committee as outlined by the Division of Research Resources in the program announcement with support from the existing administrative structure including the MGH NMR Executive Committee and the NMR Scientific Management Committee. The MGH NMR Center will provide additional equipment funding (disk drives and tape systems) as well as long term operational support to ensure that the equipment will have a substantial impact on the quality and productivity of research efforts and enable a new level of thorough data evaluation not otherwise achievable at the rates demanded by the proposed work.
