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, gel analysis, DNA and protein sequencing and searching, statistical analysis, laboratory data acquisition, and desktop publishing. We completed the conversion of our production AFS file servers and all client workstations (about 30 machines at the time) from AFS 2.0 to AFS 3.0, the first commercial release of AFS. In March, we awarded a 5-year, $1.9M contract to Sylvest Management Systems to supply AFS fileservers and maintenance. The first shipment of Sun Microsystems SPARCserver 490 systems was delivered in May, and became available for production use in early June. This year we began 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.
