High Capacity, High Performance Storage System for Neuroscience

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Contemporary neuroscience is experiencing, like many other disciplines, an ever increasing data demand due to technological improvements in data acquisition, which continue to create data sets with higher and higher resolution. Advancements in the acquisition of data have enabled novel interdisciplinary research efforts across fields, but these advancements have also resulted in the need for more robust, network-aware, high-capacity acquisition and data storage infrastructures. The Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) at the University of Southern California (USC) has become an established frontrunner in the adoption of innovative, cutting-edge technology to understand dynamic changes in health and disease. LONI’s collaborations have drastically expanded over the years, and our laboratory plays a critical role in neuroscientific observational and interventional trials and large-scale data collection efforts across institutions and countries. The increasing availability of very high-resolution, time-varying, multidimensional data has challenged the computational capabilities of ongoing projects in the field. To deal with large multidimensional datasets, the scientific community requires computational systems capable of moving, storing, manipulating and rendering large volumes of data in a practical manner. In response to these computational challenges, a group of neuro-, biomedical and computer scientists with common interests and computational needs have come together to seek funding for the requested instrumentation package, which will upgrade the storage infrastructure of our high performance computational center (HPCC) resource, alleviating significant space constraints in all aspects of our computational neuroscience investigations. The requested additional storage infrastructure will benefit many of LONI’s collaborators both at USC and across the nation. The requested instrumentation will offer benefit to collaborators given the: increase in storage capacity; co-localization of compute and storage; co-localization of pre-processed and analyzed results and raw data; and staging for third party and cloud residence. An administrative plan is already in place by which the equipment can be managed equitably. Technical and management personnel also are part of the funded group of participants. Ongoing collaborations and the common programmatic requirements will enable sharing of data, computer code, analytic procedures, computational strategies and infrastructural capabilities. The requested instrument will enhance the productivity of ongoing computational biomedical research at LONI and collaborating sites in schizophrenia, HIV/AIDS and Alzheimer’s disease, among others, and foster the development of new technology and applications for a diverse array of collaborators and multidisciplinary investigators.