Collaborative Research: CIBR: Building Capacity for Data-driven Neuroscience Research

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Advances in experimental neuroscience are generating large amounts of high-quality, high-resolution data that must be analyzed in order to reveal new insights into how the brain functions. Dealing with this data avalanche poses a special challenge for research that probes the structure and function of brain circuits and systems with techniques such as large scale high resolution light microscopy, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and high density recording of brain electrical activity. The aim of this collaborative project between the University of California San Diego and Yale University is to catalyze such research by enhancing the capabilities of the Neuroscience Gateway (NSG), an existing cyberinfrastructure resource that was originally developed to facilitate projects that need High Performance Computing, such as large scale computational modeling of brain circuits. The current project will enhance NSG by incorporating innovations in high throughput computing (HTC) and data management that are required for research involving large amounts of data, implemented in ways that reduce or eliminate the technical and administrative challenges faced by scientists who need to deal with such data. In addition to enabling data-intensive neuroscience research, these new capabilities will increase NSG's utility in education, where it is already widely used in neuroscience and biology instruction at the undergraduate level and higher. Webinars, workshops, and training classes at various conferences will be presented to students and researchers to learn about NSG's new capabilities. This project will increase NSG's scientific and social value as an open and free resource that democratizes participation in science by enabling access to computing and data resources for students and researchers at all academic institutions. This project adds HTC features to NSG that have been judged most suitable to meet the large scale computing needs for neuroscience data processing, based on actual and projected use cases provided by neuroscientists engaged in data-intensive research. It incorporates commercial cloud computing and Open Science Grid (OSG) resources, integrating them with NSG’s ability to submit appropriate compute workloads to these HTC resources while maintaining the ease of use features of NSG that allow users to seamlessly exploit these compute resources,. Many of the tools that utilize HTC computing mode are made available via NSG to allow processing of input data and retrieval of output results within the existing web based and programmatic user environment of NSG. Flexibility is also provided for users to directly use containerized images of neuroscience modeling and data processing tools on commercial cloud computing resources. Integration of OSG’s data federation capability allows processing of publicly available large neuroscience data which can be distributed in a scalable manner to HTC resources. Incorporation of various data functionalities such as the ability to transfer large data directly to NSG’s storage, share data among NSG users, access and process data by multiple NSG users, enable researchers to perform a wide diversity of data-driven neuroscience research be it processing of electrophysiological (electroencephalography i.e. EEG, magnetoencephalography i.e. MEG), imaging (fMRI) or behavioral (reaction time, test accuracy) data, correlational analysis of multimodal data, or application of machine/deep learning. Throughout the project close interaction with the user community is maintained to gain feedback as new features are added and resources are incorporated. The web site for this project can be found at https://www.nsgportal.org/This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.