This revised proposal requests funds for purchasing a computing server upgrade for the MR Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh. The MR Research center is a 15-year-old institutional resource that has been committed to develop and provide state of the art resources for MRI data acquisition, reconstruction and analysis to the biomedical research community in the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon Universities. The facility has, in the past, continuously supported major computing upgrades from departmental funds. However, given the current economic conditions in the nation, funds for capital equipment purchasing have been limited and the much-needed upgrade for our compute server has been put on hold. This upgrade is needed because the computational power provided by the existing server has quickly been exhausted by several of the image reconstruction and analysis software suites in use at the MRRC. The MRRC supports more than 100 externally funded project (>80% from the federal government) that require an increasingly higher level of computational power. The proposed instrument is designed to meet this need for the next 4-5 years.
