Collaborative Research: ABI Development: Building A Community Resource for Neuroscientists

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The University of California-San Diego and Yale University are awarded collaborative grants to develop a Neuroscience Gateway (NSG) that will facilitate access and use of high performance computing (HPC) resources by neuroscientists. Computational modeling of cells and networks has become an essential part of neuroscience research, and investigators are using models to address problems of ever increasing complexity, e.g. large scale network models and optimization or exploration of high dimensional parameter spaces. The NSG will catalyze such research by lowering or eliminating the administrative and technical barriers that currently make it difficult for investigators to use HPC resources. It will offer computer time to neuroscience users through an administratively and technologically streamlined process with a simple web portal-based environment for uploading models, specifying HPC job parameters, querying running job status and receiving job completion notices, and retrieving and storing output data. The URL of the NSG portal is http://www.nsgportal.org. It will also provide a community forum for neuroscientists to collaborate and share data. The NSG architecture will transparently distribute user jobs to appropriate HPC resources provided by NSF supercomputer centers. The NSG team will collaborate with developers of neural simulation software to optimally install, test, and benchmark these applications on HPC machines, and allow developers to test new versions before release. This project will have a transformative impact by enabling access by members of the computational neuroscience community to HPC resources for research and instruction involving compute-intensive simulations (typically large neural networks). Many of these investigators and students would otherwise find it very difficult, if not impossible, to implement and study models that press or exceed the storage and speed capabilities that are under their direct control. Computational modeling offers opportunities for students and researchers at institutions with limited resources for wet lab or experimental infrastructure to participate in leading edge science. Projects such as this, which facilitate access to HPC resources, democratize participation in science by mitigating the financial barriers to research infrastructure. The NSG will enable students and researchers, who lack access to HPC resources and are thus at a significant disadvantage compared to very few who have it, by removing the barriers for progress for many including historically underrepresented groups. The PIs of this project will target the promotion of the NSG to underrepresented minority scientists and minority serving institutions through active participation in summer training academies and a network of previously mentored female and minority students, some now employed at minority serving institutions.