SCIENCE

With the help of breakthrough visualization technologies from Silicon Graphics -- the National Cancer Institute (NCI), has been named one of six Grand Prize winners of Bio-IT World magazine's third annual Best Practices Awards. At a recent ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Jack Collins, manager, Scientific Computation and Program Development, SAIC -- Frederick, Inc, accepted the Grand Prize in the category of "Knowledge Management." The winning organizations were recognized for their noteworthy innovations and results in the research, development and manufacture of bio-IT-enabled (bioinformatics) therapeutics and diagnostics, as well as the underlying business strategies that support them. In the Bio-IT World article announcing the honorees, posted on their Web site, Kevin Davies writes that the Best Practices Award for Knowledge Management was given to the National Cancer Institute for, "An exciting example of data analysis in the field of confocal microscopy, produced with the help of Silicon Graphics, resulting in novel visualization, analysis and collaboration capabilities for researchers studying the biological origins of cancer." NCI uses a Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system powered by Intel Itanium 2 processors and running the Linux operating environment. "We are very pleased to congratulate the dedicated scientists and researchers at the National Cancer Institute on receiving this prestigious Best Practices award from a distinguished panel of their peers," said Greg Estes, vice president of marketing, SGI. "We also thank Bio-IT World for recognizing the contribution of Silicon Graphics solutions. SGI Altix high performance compute, Silicon Graphics Prism visualization systems and SGI storage solutions are assisting leading research institutions and scientists around the world to treat and potentially prevent some of the most lethal illnesses." The Best Practices awards were judged by eight experts from the scientific, IT, and business communities who reviewed a total of 33 submissions from organizations ranging from large pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to academic institutions and agencies. NCI's Confocal Microscopy Data Analysis NCI and SGI Bio-IT World award program submission entitled, "Confocal Microscopy Data Analysis: A Real-Time Image Analysis and Visualization Solution" presents results from a research project executed by SGI in collaboration with NCI's Advanced Biomedical Computing Center (ABCC) and NCI's Image Analysis Laboratory (IAL). The project goal was to develop new tools to accelerate the efficiency and workflow for microscopy scientists. The authors presented the Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system solution architecture, showed how it facilitates efficient analysis of large datasets, and presented results of several test cases on microscopy samples provided by NCI for evaluation. The NCI Advanced Biomedical Computing Center (ABCC) in Frederick, Md., also relies on a 64-processor Altix 3000 server, and a six-processor Altix 350 system, all running the Linux operating environment and powered by Intel Itanium 2 processors. The installation is part of a growing list of SGI servers supporting the nation's preeminent scientists at NCI and the National Institutes of Health. ABCC researchers depend on the Altix system's scalability and its ability to handle large memory problems, such as modeling anti-cancer drug interactions with known tumor targets or analyzing genomic/preotomic data. The Altix system, installed in September 2003, is used to enhance earlier installation of SGI servers. All servers have access to nine terabytes of shared disk space on a 10TB SGI InfiniteStorage TP9400 Fibre Channel RAID array, whose disk space is shared as a SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS clustered filesystem.