The
Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience
(SCCN), a center of the
Institute for Neural Computation
(INC) of the
University of California San Diego,
(UCSD) is
located
in a 2908-sq.ft. suite in a medical office building (above) adjacent to the
UCSD
campus
and near graduate
student and postdoctoral fellow housing. The Center has space for
fourteen researchers and scientists plus three technical staff.
(Center floor plan).
(Directions to Center).
Scott Makeig
directs the Center.
Tzyy-Ping Jung
is the associate
director. The Center was founded in 2001-2002 by gifts from
The Swartz Foundation
on the initiative of UCSD Institute for Neural
Computation director,
Terrence Sejnowski.
The
Center's goal
is to observe and model how functional activities
in multiple brain areas interact dynamically to support human
cognition, creativity and social interaction.
Current research studies are
continuing in several areas.
The Center has a 72-channel EEG recording system customized
for use in the fMRI environment, and a very-high
density
Biosemi Active Two active-electrode EEG system,
rapidly configurable either as a 256-channel system
for a single subject or as two 136-channel systems for recording
from two subjects simultaneously.
In addition, UCSD now has a 306-channel MEG
plus 128-channel EEG system
(Neuromag/Elektra).
Currently, Center has 32 1.7-2.8 GHz PIII CPUs running Linux, plus 6 TB of
online storage, all interconnected by 100 Mb and 1 Gb Ethernet, plus a WiFi network.
A dual-CPU Opteron cluster with 8 GB RAM per node, for performing very large computations,
should soon be expanded to 84 CPUs.
For Internet communications, the Center has a dedicated 1 Gb fiber connection to UCSD
and the
UC San Diego Supercomputer Center.
The Center is located less than a mile from the UCSD Medical
School and its new UCSD/Salk
Functional Brain Imaging Center
(right), directed by Rick Buxton, which houses two 3-T GE scanners
for human brain research (a 7-T is planned).
To date, our 72-channel simultaneous EEG and fMRI imaging has
been conducted on the 1.5-T Siemens scanner located at the nearby UCSD Thornton hospital.
We are now installing this system in one of the GE 3-T machines in the new Center.
