Consortium: Research Computing Resource for the CMU/Pitt Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition

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With National Science Foundation support Dr. James McClelland and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) , a consortium of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh will purchase a 24 processor compute server and a 500 Gb disk array, together with necessary ancillary facilities for backup, archival storage and data presentation. These will be augmented by desktop display stations necessary for individual researchers to access these resources. The center provides a nexus for scientists who wish to understand how cognitive processes arise from underlying neural mechanisms, how anomalous forms of cognition arise from biological disturbances, and how experience and brain development interact to give rise to the emergence of cognitive functions. The center brings together the methods of behavioral analysis, neurophysiology, functional imaging and computational modeling, in an effort to understand how functions such as perception, attention, memory and language emerge from interactions among neurons in the brain. The research in the Center has a range of foci, which can be grouped into the areas of memory and learning, language, attention and control of processing and perception and spatial cognition. In addition, several laboratories address general principles of neural function relevant to many aspects of cognition and several have contributed to the development of tools for computational modeling or functional imaging research. The effort to understand the neural basis of cognition requires the exploitation of computational technologies. This applies both in the area of analysis of experimental data obtained from functional imaging and neuronal recording studies, and in the area of computational modeling of cognitive and neural functions. Functional imaging studies in particular generate masses of raw data that must be processed and carefully treated to extract small signals from noisy inputs. To model cognition, likewise, places greater and greater demands on computing technologies as they are applied to understanding how detailed aspects of the physiology of the brain may influence the time-course and the outcome of cognition. This award provides the CNBC with a powerful cost-effective centralized computing facility which will significantly enhance the research of 17 faculty members and assist in the research and training of 21 post-doctoral fellows and 44 graduate students. The instrumentation will also be utilized by undergraduates and therefore serve valuable research and training functions.