We propose a High-End Instrumentation Biomedical Image Analysis Supercomputer (BIAS) at the University of North Carolina as a critical component of several interdisciplinary Centers and Institutes that have strong research programs coupled to biomedical research imaging. This is to enable experimental scientists to directly couple their measurements to a real-time image analysis supercomputer, a mode of operation that offers significant performance enhancement over standard batch-processed supercomputers. Most modeling and simulation computation is done mainly by separate groups with data previously collected. By having real-time image analysis important additional measurements will be made during the data collection time frame which will lead to new discoveries as compared to the less efficient collect and then model mode now being used. Our goal is to provide turn-key operation of this high- performance supercomputer to biomedical experimentalists and theorists. This will be accomplished by: (1) working directly with staff from existing Centers, who are themselves programmers, to provide applications customized to the needs of their collaborators and to access the system through the Centers' own interfaces, (2) providing an operator to install and configure other simulation and analysis tools on the system and teach users how to run them on their data sets, and (3) providing web-based CGI wrapper interfaces to the above applications for other NIH-sponsored researchers. The system provides sufficient computational resources to enable real-time coupling of simulations to running experiments to optimize model fits, validating whether a given model matches experimental results in detail. Relevance: The equipment is being specifically designed to support a set of targeted NIH-sponsored research projects in biomedical microscopy and medical image analysis. It will be used to accelerate and extend existing algorithms and develop faster and more robust algorithms for the analysis of these ongoing biological experiments. Target applications range from single-molecule simulation of protein interactions through cellular mitosis and clotting disorders such as stroke to lung defense in Cystic Fibrosis and MRI atlas formation to diagnose disease. ? ? ?
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