Storage computer for all laboratory home folders

The Quantitative Medical Imaging (QMI) laboratory's research focuses on processing and analysis of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), to make MRI data more accessible, reproducible and more quantifiable. Therefore, QMI is a computational laboratory: where traditional laboratories have "wet labs" and physical lab equipment, QMI's research instruments are heavily customized and very powerful computational resources in the form of workstations and GPU clusters that are significantly different than standard IT equipment.

The computational scientific equipment that QMI procures are designed and customized by laboratory members based on the section's scientific needs. It is quite common for vendors and equipment providers to not be able to fully satisfy all of QMI's requirements due to market conditions, which necessitates a direct interaction between QMI scientists and vendors to find a solution that the vendors can provide that suits QMI's specific scientific needs. For the acquisition in question, this interaction was facilitated and already performed by the NITAAC Open Market system's Q/A mechanism to come to a solution.

The requested computational scientific resource was designed and customized considering these points. It will be used by all lab members simultaneously, therefore, its features and capabilities needed to be based on the laboratory's current scientific needs, its infrastructure and even the number of scientists in the laboratory and the number of projects each scientist carries out.

Additionally, not only the requested resource is important for the laboratory's function, but it is indeed the most essential and critical equipment. The section's computational infrastructure is designed in such a way that every scientist accesses this resource simultaneously and continuously and every other computational resource is directly dependent on it. The current computational resource we have for this purpose (which was acquired under the ongoing NIH Project ZIA EB000088-10) is nearing end of life. Any failure on this device will not only hinder the laboratory's function but it will bring it to a stop. Therefore, we would like to request this new acquisition to replace the aging equipment for this ongoing scientific project (# ZIA EB000088-10).