The Center for Functional Imaging (https://cfn.upenn.edu) is a Type 1 Center within the Departments of Radiology and Neurology that provides infrastructure support for functional neuroimaging at the University of Pennsylvania. The CfN is comprised of investigators and staff with a broad range of expertise in neuroimaging including regulatory affairs, MRI methods development, MRI physics and pulse programming, instrumentation, experimental design, computing, and image analysis procedures.

The CfN makes use of distributed resources throughout the University of Pennsylvania, but also houses two data analysis facilities. The CfN HPC cluster consists of:

* 576 dedicated compute cores, from 21 compute nodes with dual 8-core Intel Xeon E5-2450 2.10GHz CPUs and 64GB RAM, and 30 compute nodes with dual 4-core Intel Xeon 2.83GHz E5-440 CPUs with 16GB RAM.

* A dedicated 16-core head node (running Rocks and SGE) manages cluster operations.

* Three dedicated file servers managing give  high-speed (6GB/s and 4GB/s) RAID-6 devices for over 200TB of formatted storage.

* A high-speed 10GbE internal network, and a Gigabit external network connection.

* A dedicated tape backup system with 100TB capacity.

The cluster is located in a University-run commercial-grade server room with redundant power supplies, UPS power backup systems, fire suppression system and 24-hour restricted access and security.

A lab (B19 Stemmler) has both public and private workstations and a 50-inch plasma screen for meetings and presentations.

Software and expertise to run a broad range of data analysis procedures is available, including SPM, fixed and random effects analyses, nonparametric analyses, time series extraction, both automated and manual segmentation into regions of interest, Brodmann areas, vascular distributions, BrainVoyager, FMRIB Software Library, MRIcro, AIR, AFNI, FSL, Free Surfer, SNAP, Matlab, VoxBo (developed at Penn), and others additional capabilities for large-scale processing are available in the Gee Lab. The CfN also hosts and maintains an MRI scheduling calendar for all MRI research instrumentation.

 

The CfN receives additional support from the NINDS funded Neuroscience Neuroimaging Center (P30 NS045839) and a generous gift from Mr. John Parker.