cyberinf rack

BIRN Cyberinfrastructure

At the center of the BIRN project is its scalable cyberinfrastructure—a cohesive implementation of key information technologies, applications and intuitive portal environment—designed to support interdisciplinary investigations among teams of biomedical researchers.

BIRN’s unique cyberinfrastructure is developed by the BIRN Coordinating Center in response to the needs of four scientific test beds. For example, the Function BIRN Test Bed is utilizing the network’s distributed data storage tools and capabilities for a large-scale study—involving 13 universities—investigating regional human brain dysfunctions related to schizophrenia. Through the use of advanced algorithms, running on large-scale computational resources, the ten institutions in Morphometry BIRN Test Bed are investigating structural differences in the human brain to distinguish diagnostic categories in unipolar depression and Alzheimer’s disease. In order to test hypotheses associated with human neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s diseases, the Mouse BIRN’s seven participating institutions have collaboratively developed atlas-based tools that capitalize on BIRN’s powerful data integration environment to study animal models of disease at different anatomical scales.

BIRN’s technologically advanced environment—by synchronizing developments in wide area networking, distributed computing, and the uniform access to heterogeneous data sources—is helping scientists and clinicians to make new discoveries.

Powerful Cyberinfrastructure

The BIRN’s powerful cyberinfrastructure is addressing important needs within the biomedical and health care communities by:

  • Offering scientists access to a powerful suite of biomedical tools to query, analyze, and visualize distributed databases and data collections through BIRN’s integrated Portal environment.  BIRN’s Portal environment provides a ‘common user interface,’ encouraging greater collaboration among members of diverse research institutions and scientific domains that traditionally conducted independent investigations.
  • Enabling researchers to share powerful computational resources integrated with user-friendly analysis, visualization, and data management tools, while supporting an environment in which data and software developed with public funds are preserved and accessible.
  • Allowing hypotheses testing through sampling of sparse, distributed patient populations, while also assisting in the effective dissemination of large amounts of biomedical data.
  • Accelerating the pace of scientific discovery, facilitating innovation, and moving scientific findings from laboratories to clinical practice.
  • Providing a scalable architecture for extending BIRN’s infrastructure to other biomedical and health care research communities.

To effectively share and collaboratively explore pooled, distributed data, BIRN's cyberinfrastructure has integrated several key hardware, software, and networking components:

  • BIRN Racks are installed in more than 30 research sites. Each rack supports a standardized configuration of BIRN’s applications and data storage—crucial to supporting a stable and secure collaborative infrastructure for biomedical research. Additional information about BIRN Racks is available here.
  • The BIRN Portal environment provides simple and intuitive access to a suite of intuitive collaboration tools that allow researchers to easily create and administer multi-institutional projects that share, process, and visualize distributed data. Built in communication tools, such as forums, blogs, and e-mail are available to support these collaborative research efforts.  The BIRN Portal’s Uniform BIRN Security Model provides secure and audited access to distributed data.
  • The BIRN Data Grid provides a set of linked storage resources, managed by a resource broker, to enable distributed data sources to function as a single database.
  • The BIRN Data Integration infrastructure allows users to explore data using “intelligent” query engines that can make inferences upon locating “interesting” data.” BIRN uses a 'mediator architecture' to integrate multiple databases according to specified schemas or integrated views.
  • The BIRN Computational GRID enables the BIRN to take full advantage of Grid middleware resources in academia & industry.

BIRN Software

BIRN provides for infrastructure updates where users receive an integrated release of new and enhanced capabilities, bug fixes, and revised documentation regarding innovations. Emphasis is on releases of integrated tools to enhance research workflows. The test beds play an integral role in these releases by continuing to provide requirements, tools, and valuable feedback.

BIRN Data

In addition to numerous software tools, the BIRN test beds periodically release to the public useful data sets of potential utility to biomedical researchers. Some of the data sets characterize the intersite, intersubject, and intersession variance common to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies. Other data sets represent unique brain atlases and data sets acquired with magnetic resonance microscopy or multi-photon microscopy studies. Detailed information about BIRN data is found on our BIRN Data Repository page.