Marcus E. Raichle, M.D., professor of anatomy and neurobiology, of neurology, of radiology and in the Program in Biological and Biomedical Engineering, and David C. Van Essen, Ph.D., head of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology and the Edison Professor of Neurobiology, will create and operate a set of brain-mapping databases and will develop powerful software for deforming segmented brain images and scalable software for warping brain and anatomy data. Cox and Turner will provide the neuroscience infrastructure for Miller, Raichle and Van Essen, mainly in the form of a 400-gigabit storage cache located in the School of Engineering's Applied Research Laboratory and connected to collaborators by the Project Zeus network. ATM is a switching and transmission technique. Turner has been a pioneering contributor to ATM architecture for more than a decade. This involves installing and fine-tuning deformation algorithms at the UCSD and UCLA sites.
Algorithms are mathematical programs that make the decisions for a machine to perform tasks.
Gurudatta M. Parulkar, Ph.D., associate professor of computer science and director of the Applied Research Laboratory, will supervise development of systems and communications software to move data between cooperating gigabit networks and will supervise the interaction of gigabit brain-mapping applications. The new arrangement avoids isolated pockets of advanced computing in favor of a coordinated fabric where each facility can be applied to problems for which it is most suited. The partnership comes at an opportune time to meet the next stage of developments in computational research. We are now able to deal with massive amounts of data, both for computation and for storage, allowing researchers to tackle problems previously unapproachable.