NSG and HPAC Workshop at Neuroscience 2019
Developers and users of the Neuroscience Gateway (NSG) and the Human Brain Project’s (HBP) High Performance Analytics and Computing (HPAC) Platform held a successful satellite workshop on October 19 at Neuroscience 2019 (Chicago, USA), the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN). In the workshop, neuroscientists discussed their research requirements, for which large scale modeling, data processing and data management are important. This was the 3rd iteration of this workshop at SfN annual meetings and it showcased the services offered by the NSG Portal (USA) and the HBP’s HPAC Platform (Europe). The audience was composed of neuroscientists requiring High Performance Computing (HPC) resources for computationally intensive tasks, such as large modeling and simulation projects or the analysis of neuroimaging data.
Background on the NSG Portal and HPAC Platform
The NSG Portal enables neuroscientists to run large scale simulations and data processing on the US National Science Foundation (NSF) funded supercomputers and academic cloud resources located at various academic supercomputing centers, eliminating administrative and technical barriers by providing free supercomputing time to users and easy access to widely used neuroscience tools. The NSG's web-based interface simplifies the tasks of uploading models or data, specifying job parameters, monitoring job status, and storing and retrieving output data. Additionally, NSG allows tool developers to disseminate their newly developed tools on NSG which has a growing user base. Furthermore, NSG is used for teaching in classrooms and at workshops.
The High Performance Analytics and Computing (HPAC) Platform provides HBP-specific interfaces to the underlying Fenix infrastructure. The HPAC Platform makes the Fenix supercomputing and data facilities federated across five leading European supercomputing centres accessible to neuroscientists in ways that work best for them, for example through the HBP’s web portal “Collaboratory”.
HPAC and Fenix enable scientists to run large-scale, data intensive, interactive brain simulations up to the size of a full human brain, to manage the large amounts of data used and produced in the Human Brain Project, and to manage complex workflows comprising concurrent simulation, data analysis and visualization workloads.
To support users in using the research infrastructure most efficiently, this project also conducts research in areas that require profound expertise in HPC and a close integration at the infrastructure level, for instance the development and optimisation of simulation technology for modern HPC architectures, or visualisation methods and tools specialised on large datasets and simulation data.
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Original Announcement for NSG and HPAC Workshop
Workshop: NSG and HPAC - Large Scale Simulations and Data Processing
Saturday 19 October, 2019 | 08:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Chicago Downtown, USA
https://neuron.yale.edu/neuron/static/courses/nsg2019/nsg2019.html
The Neuroscience Gateway Portal (NSG https://www.nsgportal.org/) enables neuroscientists to do large scale simulations and data processing on the US NSF funded supercomputers and academic cloud resources located at various academic supercomputing centers. It eliminates administrative and technical barriers by providing free supercomputing time to users and easy access to widely used neuroscience tools that currently includes BluePyOpt, Brian, BMTK, CARLsim, DynaSim, EEGLAB, Freesurfer, GENESIS, Human Neocortical Neurosolver (HNN), MATLAB, MOOSE, NEST, NetPyNE, NEURON, Octave, PyNN, Python, R, TensorFlow etc. NSG's web-based interface simplifies the tasks of uploading models or data, specifying job parameters, monitoring job status, and storing and retrieving output data. NSG allows tool developers to disseminate their newly developed tools on NSG which has a growing user base. NSG is also used for teaching at classrooms and workshops. The Human Brain Project's High Performance Analytics and Computing Platform (HPAC https://hbp-hpc-platform.fz-juelich.de/) provides extensive HPC support for the HBP community. This includes developing and providing the hardware and software infrastructure required for large scale simulations, data management and analysis, visualization, and managing the complex workflows involved in performing these tasks. Speakers at the workshop will discuss their research where large scale modeling, data processing and data management are important.