January Status Update

NIH establishes NCATS and dissolves NCRR

As a part the NIH plan to start a new center on translational medicine (NCATS), as of December 23, 2011, NCRR has been dissolved by order of Congress and the President of the United States.   With the cessation of NCRR, NE-CAT has been transferred to the new Division of Biomedical Technology, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).

PILATUS-6MF installation on 24-ID-C

The PILATUS-6MF was moved into the 24-ID-C hutch during the January shutdown.  A new Lexan curtain has been made by Ed Lynch which will cover the front of the detector.  The Lexan curtain will slide into place when users are in the hutch and prevent accidental contact with the front of the detector.

Due to the size of the PILATUS-6MF, the detector cannot be moved any closer than 250 mm.  This still allows for ~1.4 Angstroms resolution at the Se edge.  Distances closer than 250 mm will require Staff intervention.  New hard limits have been set to prevent accidental collisions between the detector and the MD2 microdiffractometer.

The ADSC Q315 detector has been left connected and inside the 24-ID-C hutch.  If any group desires to use the Q315 instead of Pilatus-6MF we will be able to revert back to the Q315 within 4-5hrs of time.

Fiber Optic Network Upgrade

A new 40 port 8Gigabit fiber switch was added to our fiber optic network. With this addition, two old 12 port 2Gigabit switches were taken out of service. This upgrade brings our fiber optic network to a uniform 8Gb/sec speed. This increase speed is timely with Pilatus-6MF installation, which is known to be network bandwidth demanding.

Additional Storage Space Added

Two SATABeasts were added to our storage pool. This addition enhances our storage capacity by 120TB and brings us to a total of 178TB of data storage.  Again, this is a timely upgrade because the Pilatus-6MF is known to produce massive amounts of data at a rapid pace.