Special Exhibits on Resources for Intramural Research

CIT - HPC Core Facility NIH High Performance Computing (HPC) is one of 12 resources available to support the requirements of 1,200 principal investigators (PIs) and over 4,000 postdoctoral fellows performing basic, translational and clinical research in the Intramural Research Program (IRP). The Biowulf cluster is the large-scale central computational resource dedicated to biomedical computing in NIH’s IRP. With more than 25,000 compute cores and 5 PB of storage, a dedicated Biowulf staff supports over 750 active users. NIH is investing resources over a five year period to expand HPC to meet the needs of the IRP. Outcomes include: 1) Modern architecture providing both the power and flexibility to meet varied needs of IRP investigators 2) Enable data sharing and scientific collaboration through central location of data 3) Ability to create an ‘NIH private cloud’ 4) Common applications support 5) Ample high-availability secure storage.

https://hpc.nih.gov/

CIT – NIH Network Modernization and CIT Unified Communications & Collaboration The NIH Network Modernization is a strategic effort to increase NIH’s network bandwidth on and off campus, recognized and funded as a multi-year capital investment. Increasing bandwidth improves speed, reliability and security of the NIH Network. In addition to these benefits, a dedicated research/science network will be configured (Science DMZ). This “Science DMZ” is a special NIH network designed to provide high-speed communications for select NIH projects that require connection rates of up to 100 Gigabits per second with external research partners and collaborators. In November of 2014, the NIH successfully upgraded Internet2 to support 100 Gbps connections to the research community – this achievement resulted in high speed data transfers between researchers located on campus and external collaborators. The CIT Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC) team provides services that enable NIH staff to communicate and collaborate in real-time with people both internal and external to NIH via instant messaging and presence, desktop collaboration, integrated audio and video calls, online meetings, and video conferencing. Our services include Cisco Jabber, Microsoft Lync, WebEx, VideoCast and UCCast, just to name several. We will be demonstrating and showcasing how you can leverage technology and UCC services to work from any location.

CIT – Biomedical Research Informatics Computing System (BRICS) Biomedical Research Informatics Computing System (BRICS) was developed to support interconnectivity and collaboration across research communities. Today BRICS enables the standardized collection of clinical data and improves data sharing among qualified researchers. This access, combined with the ability to query a larger amount of data than a single researcher could amass, promotes collaboration in the research community. BRICS fulfills federal Open Data mandates, enables important research to be published, and most importantly, directly accelerates discovery. BRICS is in use today within the NIH community, the extramural research community, and the Department of Defense, supporting global research efforts related to Parkinson's disease, Traumatic Brain Injury, and rare disease research. Its goal of acceleration of scientific discovery offers faster developments of new prevention and treatments that will help save—and improve the quality of life—for millions of people afflicted in the research communities that BRICS supports. BRICS was named “Best Overall Project” at the Federal Health Information Technology (FHIT) 2015 Innovation Awards.

https://brics.cit.nih.gov/

The Office of Science and Technology Resources (CCR/NCI), developed and launched an online private research marketplace which comprehensively catalogs research services available through Trans-NIH and NCI core labs, as well as over 12,000 commercial vendors. Based on its success within CCR, CREx has been adopted by the NIH Office of Intramural Research (OIR) as a platform to increase the visibility of core lab resources and expertise across the NIH Intramural Research Program (IRP), with the central goal of fostering collaboration within the IRP and making IRP researchers aware of scientific resources embedded within Institutes and Centers. As part of the initial pilot expansion to the IRP, CREx now includes cores and scientific resources from eight additional Institutes. CREx enables IRP users to easily search for and communicate with multiple I/C cores and vendors simultaneously through their private dashboard. Investigators can rate and review vendors and services, and share their experiences with the rest of the NIH.

https://nci.assaydepot.com/users/sign_in

The Conserved Domain database (CDD) is a collection of multiple sequence alignments that represent ancient conserved domains, organized into family hierarchies, and equipped with functional annotation. CDD includes NCBI-curated protein domain models as well as imported models from Pfam, SMART, TIGRFAM, and COG, among others. CDD curators rely heavily on three-dimensional protein structures deposited in the Protein Databank (PDB), to define domain extent and the location of structurally conserved cores, and to provide accurate alignments between diverse family members via structure superposition. Currently, about 95% of all structure-derived proteins longer than 50 residues are annotated by CDD in NCBI’s Entrez database, and about 16,155 functional sites have been recorded on about 6,345 domain models, almost half of which are supported by direct evidence observed in 3D structures of protein complexes. These conserved functional sites can be mapped onto sequences computationally. Pre-calculated annotation is available for all sequences in the Entrez protein database, and appears on the protein record.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Structure/cdd/cdd.shtml

The Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch (BCBB) drives informatics at NIAID for global health clinicians and researchers by fostering a pipeline of products, platforms, and solutions. Our exhibit will highlight our newest research, training, and service offerings available to the NIH research community.

https://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/organization/odoffices/omo/ocicb/Pages/…

The Intramural Research Program (IRP) is the internal research program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), known for its synergistic approach to biomedical science. With 1,200 Principal Investigators and more than 4,000 Postdoctoral Fellows conducting basic, translational, and clinical research, the IRP is the largest biomedical research institution on earth. IRP representatives will host a table at the NIH Research Festival to highlight opportunities for promoting your research to outside scientists and the general public, including via the "I Am Intramural" Blog, the IRP website, social media channels, videos, stories, podcasting, and beyond. We seek IRP researchers at all levels who would like to share their stories of research at the IRP and how what you do each day changes people's lives.

https://irp.nih.gov/

The NIH Library is an open stacks biomedical research library, whose collection and services are developed to support the programs of the National Institutes of Health and selected U.S. Department of Health and Human Services agencies. The NIH Library provides access to over 10,000 electronic journals, 16,000 e-books, and over 170 databases. The NIH Library provides services in bibliometrics, bioinformatics, custom information solutions, data management & analysis, document delivery, editing, literature searching, Informationists, systematic reviews, training, and translations.

https://nihlibrary.nih.gov/

NITAAC is the designated federal Executive Agent authorized by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to administer three Government-Wide Acquisition Contracts (GWACs) for information technology (IT). With a combined contract ceiling of $60 billion, the CIO-SP3, CIO-SP3 Small Business and CIO-CS contracting vehicles can be used by any federal civilian or Department of Defense (DoD) agency to procure IT products, services and solutions. Our three contract vehicles boast streamlined acquisition and fast ordering, a single-login electronic-Government Ordering System (e-GOS) with built-in guidance and automated task order completion, and ceiling rates negotiated at the Master Contract level to be the best available.

https://nitaac.nih.gov/

OLAO provides the NIH with a number of services through various IDIQ contracts. For example, the LTASC contract has been providing the NIH with administrative personnel for a number of years; The NIHCATS contract has supported hundreds of NIH conferences; PICS has supported a range of communications projects; and NIHBPSS has provided the NIH with business professional support for numerous projects across ICs.

https://olao.od.nih.gov/office-acquisitions/multiple-vehicle-contracts-…

The Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum preserves and interprets the history of the NIH. The office collects scientific and non-scientific instruments, objects, photographs, and documents related to NIH history; produces physical and virtual exhibits; helps other NIH components decide the best means of meeting their records management requirements; and answers inquiries from other NIH components, government leaders, scholars, and the public. The office also has a robust social media presence focusing on one topic a month. Currently, we are in the planning stages for three exhibits to be located in the Clinical Centerr--our two tables at the Research Festival will explain more about them using models and other resources.

https://history.nih.gov

The Office of Research Services (ORS) provides a comprehensive portfolio of services to support the biomedical research mission of the NIH. Some examples of the diverse services ORS provides include: laboratory safety, security and emergency response, veterinary resources, the NIH Library, events management, travel and transportation, visual arts and multimedia, relevant services for foreign scientists, and many more programs and employee services to enrich and enhance the NIH worksite.

https://ors.od.nih.gov/Pages/home.aspx

Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology that replaces a user's sensory inputs in order to simulate real or imaginary environments. When done correctly the user experiences "presence" in which they react to stimuli in the virtual world as if it was real. Thus within a virtual environment, a user may respond in ways that would be very difficult to elicit in reality. For example, virtual worlds can be created such that certain real world stimuli are missing or changed; such as stimuli related to pain, stress, gender, age, physical size, physical shape, distance and time. Another important VR topic is social VR in which two or more people located at different locations come together in a virtual world through the use of avatars. Some of the numerous uses for social VR are meetings, patient diagnosis, and therapy. Current VR avatars not only use your voice, but also copy your head and arm movements as well as duplicate your mouth movements and your facial expressions. Soon, all of your non-verbal communication will be replicated in virtual worlds. Other uses of VR are for productivity (virtual worlds containing numerous computer screens partially controlled by your gaze) and teaching (virtual worlds containing interactable and programmable objects). Lastly, there is augmented and mixed reality where virtual objects and virtual information is combined with reality. The potential uses for these technologies will eventually be larger than that of VR.

This page was last updated on Friday, March 12, 2021