Facilities and Services

Scanning Services: The centerpiece of the INC is a Siemens Prisma^fit 3 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system equipped with 20- and 32-channel head coils. INC researchers use different types of images to explore the brain, including: functional MRI (fMRI) to measure brain activity related to various behaviors; diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to understand the connectivity and architecture within the brain; and structural imaging to determine the locations and sizes of brain structures. INC researchers investigate brain activity and structure in healthy and clinical populations across all ages, from infants to older adults.

For directions to our facility, please click here.

Storage Infrastructure:

INC’s storage and computing resources rely on services from INC staff, as well as infrastructure from CU Boulder’s Research Computing (RC) and Shared Infrastructure Services  (SIS) divisions. Raw scanner data are synced daily with the PetaLibrary, a National Science Foundation-subsidized service for the storage, archiving, and sharing of research data managed by RC. INC maintains 575  TB of active storage on the PetaLibrary for storing the raw and processed data. This storage pool can be expanded on demand via a request to RC without incurring any down time. Additionally, INC maintains 100 TB of taped-backed archive storage on PetaLibrary (managed by RC) for backing up compressed archive data.

Compute Infrastructure:

INC has maintained a close relationship with University of Colorado Research Computing (CURC) for the support of both Data and Compute Infrastructure. INC is a participating facility for CURC's newly constructed hybrid cloud computing (CUmulus) infrastructure. INC has deployed an NIH compliance platform, Flywheel within CUmulus with includes 4 virtual machines for data ingestion, compute, and database management. Analyses and processing of the data are also still available on an high performance compute (HPC) cluster managed by Research Computing (Blanca), which consists of 12 INC-owned compute nodes (in addition to 2 dedicated login nodes). The compute nodes are heterogeneous; however, each node has 256GB of RAM and a minimum of a 2.4 GHz processor (5 nodes have a 2.6 GHz processor). Seven of the nodes have 32 processing cores, while the remaining 5 have 28 cores for a total of 364 compute cores. Software for data processing and analysis on Blanca includes: slurm workload manager, MatLab, R, Python, AFNI, FSL, SPM, CONN, fMRIPrep, HCP Pipeline, Caret, FreeSurfer, and many more containerized analysis pipelines.

Data and Analysis Services: Below is a list of data and analysis services offered at INC. For a more detailed description of what is included in each service, please click on the name of the service. Rates for each service are listed in the section below this summary. Clients do not need to scan with us in order to take advantage of these services (we have multiple ways of safely and securely transferring your scanner data onto our storage servers).

Interested in data and analysis services? Check out our list of most commonly supported analyses and docmentation on our newest platform, Flywheel.io!. Didn't find what you are looking for? Contact us!

• Data Storage Services: Measured in terabytes of managed storage on CU's PetaLibrary

• NIH Compliance and Analysis Support: Measure in neuroimaging sessions. Analysis support includes access to the NIH compliance platform, Flywheel, code development support from our team, and dedicated time on our compute resources including the HPC environment and hybrid cloud. Neuroimaging analysis support includes access to the cutting edge and widely used preprocessing and statistical software such as: BIDS conversion, fMRIPrep, HCP pipeline, FSL preprocessing pipeline, qsiPrep DTI preprocessing, FSL DTI preprocessing, CONN subject and group-level analyses).

To request PetaLibrary and blanca-ics access, please follow the instructions here.

Rates Fiscal Year 2023:

Invoices for INC services are gennerated on a monthly basis. Data storage costs are assessed and billed at the end of each month. NIH compliance and analysis support charges are a one time fee. Note: the data storage rate is counted in total TBs used on PetaLibrary, not just new data added. Data added and deleted within the same month will not incur any cost.