The Biomedical informatics Research Network or BIRN , started in 2000, is a National Institutes of Health initiative providing a framework of people and information technology infrastructure — notably a grid of supercomputers — for distributed collaborations in biomedical science.
As of 2005, the BIRN involves a consortium of 19 universities and 26 research groups across the United States. BIRN has three test-bed projects on neuroimaging of human neurological disorders and associated animal models.
