Press Release about the ARCiB project on 1 February 2002

Dowling College Receives NSF Grant to Make Biology Software More Accessible

Prof. Herbert J. Bernstein at Dowling College has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation in the amount of $94,463 from NSF for The Accessible Retired Computers in Biology (ARCiB) project. The project provides ongoing transitional support for software packages, especially those associated with structural biology, as existing hardware platforms are replaced. This will reduce disruption to research and education programs that use these software packages.

ARCiB will be used to help support existing packages and make them available by remote access. If packages are open source and the developer would like to transfer all or part of the support, ARCiB will offer both an archive location for source and binaries as well as making the packages available. Undergraduates are actively involved in this research program for maintaining multi-platform interoperability.

The project is soliciting donations of older, but working, graphics workstations and/or remote access to such workstations. Business and schools that are willing to donate such computers or to provide remote access to them for use in porting releases of software important to biology should contact the ARCiB project at Dowling College. It is very important that donated systems be complete with operating system, compilers, licenses, keyboard, monitor and mouse, and the necessary documentation to allow the project to rename and renumber the workstation to work on a new local area network. Systems made available for remote access should support SSH. Business and schools making such donations would be doing a service to the community. This service would be gratefully and publicly acknowledged.

Prof. Bernstein has said, "We are very grateful to the National Science Foundation for this funding. In addition to helping keep important software packages available to the community, the ARCiB project will help us to understand subtle issues in 'porting' software among different types of computers, and help in training a new generation of students to work on the internals of such software.

Right now, we are particularly interested in Sun, DEC/Compaq, SGI and IBM work- stations. Please send email describing what you have available to Please do not ship systems without prior arrangement. We want to give each donated machine proper attention."

For more information, contact: Professor Herbert Bernstein, Dowling College, Oakdale, NY 11769, via email to