The 2010 NIH Research Festival

CIT's commitment to the advancement of computational science was on display this October at the 2010 NIH Research Festival, an annual showcase for the activities of the NIH Intramural Research Program.

This year's research festival, which took place from October 5th to the 8th, was co-chaired by Richard Leapman, Scientific Director, NIBIB and Richard Nakamura, Scientific Director, NIMH, and coordinated by NIH Research Festival Coordinating Committee.

Festival events and sessions

The opening plenary session on Tuesday, October 5, began at 9:00 a.m. in the NIH Clinical Center's Masur Auditorium. The featured topic, DNA Unwound: The Path from Characterization to Treatment of Rare and Common Genetic-based Disorders, was dedicated to the legacy of Marshall Nirenberg and addressed diverse areas of DNA-related research, such as the genetics of complex phenotypes and of social behavior, the effects of epigenetics on disease development, the discovery of new genetic disorders, and the development of high-throughput technology.

Other events during the four-day research festival were presented in and around the Natcher Conference Center. They included a neurobiology symposium and tribute to Marshall Nirenberg on October 8th (Neurobiology Symposium), cross-cutting symposia and poster sessions, special exhibits on resources for intramural research, the 2011 Fellows Award for Research Excellence (FARE) Program and Award Ceremony, and the Technical Sales Association (TSA) Exhibit tent show.

CIT participation

The CIT exhibit, hosted in the main hall of Natcher, showcased some of the many services through which we support NIH and other federal research programs. Visitors to the exhibit could learn about service offerings such as:

• Multi-platform application hosting on secure virtual and physical servers


• Enterprise Software Licensing/Information Systems Designated Procurement (ISDP)


• Google search engine services for NIH websites


• On- and off-campus co-location options for customers who own their own servers but are looking for a secure, environmentally-controlled location


• Efforts and strategies for greening the NIH Data Center

Staff members from CIT's Training Program were also present to tell festival attendees about course offerings and help them enroll in free training classes through the Training Program's website (http://training.cit.nih.gov/).

At the CIT Video Services table in the Natcher Atrium, an iPad display caught the eye of visitors and demonstrated the effectiveness of videocasting, one of many communication and collaboration services offered by CIT that allows the NIH community to interact with people around the world.

These services include:

• VideoCasting & Podcasting: Presentations are sent as live streaming video, then archived in a form that allows the viewer to rewind, fast forward, and pause the show. Podcast files can be downloaded and viewed offline on a computer or portable media player.


• NIH Web Collaboration using Connect: Online meeting application that allows you to hold virtual meetings and share documents, images, and video online with colleagues or collaborators across the globe, without the high costs and scheduling difficulties of travel.


• Video Conferencing: Enables people to attend meetings held in another location by sending a real-time, TV-style signal between two or more rooms.


• Conference Room Design & Support: Traditional spaces can be transformed into Multimedia Conference Rooms for meeting with people in the room, as well as remote attendees using VideoTeleConferencing (VTC) and Web Collaboration.

Helix Systems Services

Under the heading Applied Biomedical Supercomputing on the NIH Helix Systems, CIT's Helix Systems Services hosted a separate exhibit in the area adjacent to the scientific poster sessions. Their focus was on the high-performance scientific computational tools, training, consulting, and collaboration that NIH Helix Systems provide for the intramural NIH community. The exhibit highlighted Next Generation Sequencing as one of the powerful computational research tools available to Helix users and allowed visitors to try out SciWare, which enables Helix users to run desktop-suitable scientific applications directly on their Windows, Mac, and Linux workstations.

The exhibit also included information about other Helix resources, such as the Biowulf Linux cluster with almost 9,000 processors, very large memory systems (72-512 GB), high-performance file systems, as well as numerous applications that help researchers perform computations. Helix Systems applications include:

• Licensed products such as Matlab and the Biobase suite for gene regulation and transcription interpretation,


• Sequence assembly packages such as MIRA and Velvet,


• Web applications such as the EMBOSS sequence analysis suite,


• In-house-developed tools such as DNAworks for oligonucleotide design and StrucTools for 3-D structure analysis, and


• Applications for small- or large-scale use in the areas of computational chemistry, molecular dynamics, sequence analysis, linkage and phylogenetic analysis, structural biology, mathematical and statistical analysis, image processing, proteomics, and more.

For more information on the Helix Systems Services offered by CIT, visit the CIT Service Catalog's Scientific Computing section.

Poster sessions

Several research festival poster sessions featured scientists from CIT's Division of Computational Bioscience (DCB). The following projects included scientists from CIT at poster sessions:

More on the NIH Research Festival

You can find information on past research festivals at the Research Festival website http://researchfestival.nih.gov/index.php under the link "Past Research Festivals."

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