GAMING

PALO ALTO, CA -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) has selected Dartmouth College's fMRI Data Center as a Center of Excellence in Neuroscience. The fMRI Data Center provides a critical data repository of functional neuroimaging data accessible via the Web to the entire research community to advance the field of neuroscience and contribute to the development of fMRI. For the first time, fMRI can easily draw on the knowledge of experts from many disciplines, such as Mathematics and Computer Science, and will accept data from those researchers who are publishing fMRI research articles in peer-reviewed journals. The fMRI Data Center is powered by a cluster of Sun Fire V880 servers in conjunction with Sun's E420R and E5500 servers. The COE environment will run on this cluster utilizing the Sun Grid Engine, and including QFS, SAM-FS, a Sun Blade 2000 Anniversary Edition personal visualization workstation, and Sun StorEdge 3910 with 3.9 TB of data storage. Novel methods are required to warehouse and organize large-scale datasets from many areas of science. In so doing unique approaches to mining data archives can facilitate progress in understanding the fundamental aspects of phenomena such as human brain function. The fMRI Data Center is making critical breakthroughs in the storage and analysis of functional neuroimaging datasets with the goal of furthering understanding of basic cognitive processes. "As a Sun Center of Excellence, we are able to facilitate the advancement of critical research in the field of neuroscience by creating an open environment for sharing data," said Jeff Woodward, Project Manager of Systems and Systems Integration. "Powered by Sun's cost effective and scalable technology, we've already made accessible a wide set of data to the broader scientific community and will continue to expand the data repository through progressive research." "Dartmouth's method of sharing research data and publishing to the Internet built by the fMRI Data Center can be used throughout the scientific community to advance neuroscientific research," commented Joe Hartley, Regional Director, Sun Microsystems. "The research being undertaken at Dartmouth is reflective of Sun's commitment to facilitating an open computing environment and the principles underlying our Center of Excellence program." Sun's Center of Excellence program includes 33 centers worldwide in the areas of high performance computing, computational biology, digital libraries and e-learning. For more information visit www.sun.com/edu.