ACQUISTION OF A VAX COMPUTER SYSTEM

加州大学洛杉矶分校文学院的生命科学系

The departments of Life Sciences at UCLA in the College of Letters and Sciences and in the Center for Health Sciences rank among the best in the nation, and there is a major strength in NIH-funded research in molecular biology. The connecting link between these multiple diverse biomedical research projects is the requirement for detailed computational analysis of nucleic acid and protein sequences. In 1985 a VAX 11/750 minicomputer was purchased through an NIH BRS multiuser equipment grant, and a sequence analysis facility was established. This facility consists of the VAX 11/750, which is connected by Decnet and Ethernet to all the major computer networks, and 12 IBM PS2-50 microcomputers connected by direct lines to the VAX. In addition to microcomputers with printers, the facility has an optical scanner (Datacopy), three HP plotters, two HP lasers printers, an IBI digitizer for reading in sequences, and a computerized densitometer. Several major sequence analysis packages are running on the VAX, in addition to all the major sequence databases together with the appropriate search software. The usage of this facility has grown from an original 16 users to 196 users from 69 laboratories, and the current VAX 11/750 computer is clearly no longer adequate for supporting this large research community. We are therefore submitting this proposal for upgrading the VAX computer for this facility in order to maintain state of the art research capabilities in Life Sciences at UCLA.