Neuroscience Gateway Enabling Large Scale Modeling and Data Processing in Neuroscience Research

Abstract

The Neuroscience Gateway (NSG) has been serving the computational neuroscience community over seven years since its inception in early 2013. It has fulfilled its original goal of catalyzing progress in computational neuroscience by reducing technical and administrative barriers that neuroscientists face in accessing and using high performance computing (HPC) resources needed for large scale neuronal modeling projects involving tools and software which require and run efficiently on HPC resources of XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment). In recent years, in addition to computational neuroscientists, growing numbers of experimentalists such as cognitive neuroscientists, psychologists, biomedical researchers, physicists and electrical engineers are increasingly interested in using NSG for their neuroscience data processing and analysis needs. We also notice an expanding use of machine/deep learning approaches in neuroscience research. To accommodate the needs of these types of data processing and machine/deep learning workloads NSG is adding new cyberinfrastructure (CI) capabilities, features and resources. Large scale computational workloads that are focused on processing and analysis of brain image data and machine learning require high throughput computing (HTC) resources than HPC, utilize commercial cloud and GPUs, and use various data functionalities, such as ability to transfer/store large data to/on NSG, validate the data, process same data by multiple users on NSG provided compute resources, publish final data products, visualize the data, search the data etc. Until now, NSG has primarily been a resource for neuroscience users who use NSG for their computational neuroscience work and, more recently, data processing workloads. But recently there is a demand from the neuroscience community to make NSG an environment where neuroscience tool developers can test, benchmark, and scale their newly developed tools and eventually disseminate their tools via the NSG for neuroscience users. In this short poster-paper we will show (i) how NSG has been successfully serving primarily the computational neuroscience community, as well as some data processing focused neuroscience researchers, until now, (ii) how we plan NSG to be a tool developers environment in addition to it already successfully being a science gateway for the neuroscience community and (iii) how NSG is transforming to accommodate more data processing and machine learning oriented neuroscience users.