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Image: This image shows a model of cells within the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), a structure deep within the brain that relays visual information obtained from the retina onto the visual cortex located near the back of the head. </I>[See related images: <B>Axon Forest, Pyramidal Cell in Cortical Layers, and Pyramidal Cells in the Visual Cortex</B>.]</I><BR> <BR> <font color=#DC143C><B><U>Important:</U> Use of this image is restricted. Please see “Restrictions” (below) for complete information.</font></B><BR> <BR> <U><B>More about this Image</B></U><BR> The cells pictured in this image are termed thalamocortical cells, because they send information from the thalamus (of which the LGN is a part) to the cortex. The LGN has a layered structure similar to that of the cortex, and the illustrated cells belong to parvocellular layers that, among other things, transfer color information from the retina to the brain. The small spines along the dendrites are places where these thalamocortical cells receive information from other cells not pictured.<BR> <BR> This still image was derived from animations developed by Greg Hood, John Burkardt, and Greg Foss of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The work contributed to the planetarium show
"Gray Matters" was a collaboration among the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). The work was supported in part by National Science Foundation (NSF) grant 97-05491.

In 1987, the PSC biomedical program became the first extramural biomedical supercomputing program in the country, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Since then, with support from the NIH National Center for Research Resources, PSC has fostered exchange between PSC expertise in computational science and experts in biology and medicine to solve important problems in the life sciences.

Through the NSF, PSC provides access to LeMieux, a 3,000 processor terascale system capable of six trillion computations per second. As of March 2003, with support from NIH and NSF, PSC has also installed two 16-processor HP GS-1280 based systems. These two shared memory systems, with very high memory bandwidth -- named “Jonas” and “Rachel” for famous Pittsburgh scientists Jonas Salk and Rachel Carson -- will be upgraded to larger systems.

In addition to training and access to computational resources, the biomedical group carries out research in structural biology, protein and nucleic-acid sequence analysis, computational neuroscience, and microphysiology. In the latter fields, PSC staff work in developing and conducting research with widely used applications software, including MCell, NEOSIM, and PGenesis. Thumbnail">

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Last Modified: Jan 31, 2001