Overview
The W.M. Keck Foundation Center for Integrative Neuroscience was established at the University of California, San Francisco in 1990. Within the Keck Center, more than 100 scientists in 13 laboratories are discovering how we see, hear, move our limbs, feel pain, learn, remember, speak and understand language. Many custom applications are created by the Keck foundation to meet these specific needs. Often, applications that run in these critical environments evolve in unexpected ways over the years. Updating such applications to accurately operate on more modern, dependable and less expensive platforms can significantly slow down research projects, unless managed with the seamless migration strategies and innovative development tools that IntervalZero (formerly Ardence and Venturcom) software offers.

The Challenge
Dr. Stephen Lisberger is in charge of the lab which performs computational and neural studies of eye movements. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute funds the Lisberger Lab and enabled the creation of a custom application called Maestro, which gathers data about eye movements as well as other aspects of the visual system. The researchers conduct experiments in awake, behaviorally-trained rhesus monkeys and entail quantitative assessments of motor performance, extra cellular recording from single brain cells, theory-based analyses of neural and behavioral data, and computational analyses of models that are based on biological observations. Since Maestro provides real-time data acquisition and multi-modal stimulus control for these experiments, it is a vital tool for this research. However, the Windows platform which the program was developed in lacked the real-time performance, application stability, and direct access to hardware that was required to function. Further, as the project matured, the researchers needed to reduce the cost-inefficiency of operating on two computers while moving Maestro to a newer Windows-based system.

The Solution
Originally developed as a distributed program on a UNIX workstation and two DOS PC's in 1999, Maestro, then called Cntrlx, was built using IntervalZero's Real-Time Extension (RTX). RTX brought to Windows exactly what the researchers needed with real-time performance, fine-grain thread scheduling, direct hardware access, and improved stability.

The Result
As Windows NT evolved into Windows 2000 and now XP, IntervalZero RTX has evolved with it, so migrating Maestro to the newer platforms has been effortless. RTX allowed Maestro to move to each new platform in a "ready to run" mode - no application performance tuning was needed - this reduced costs, saved time, and improved the reliability of their research data. In the future, RTX will be able to further expand Maestro's capabilities to include a communication link between the PC running Maestro and video PCs that are using modern high-performance video cards, support multi-processor and multi-core systems to allow RTX to integrate a high-performance video card into the Maestro PC itself without impacting the real-time responsiveness of its hardware controller, and migrate to a multi-core system that would allow researchers to perform "on the fly" analysis of data as it is acquired.