Neuroscience Gateway – An Overview

The Neuroscience Gateway (NSG http://www.nsgportal.org), a NSF funded project, catalyzes computational neuroscience research by lowering or eliminating the <br>administrative and technical barriers that can make it difficult for <br>neuroscience researchers to access supercomputer resources for large <br>scale simulations and brain image data processing. It provides free and <br>open access to supercomputers using time acquired via the peer reviewed allocation process managed by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). <br><br>It has about 400 registered users. Total core hours used, per-user rate of usage, and the number of users have all been growing at a rapid rate. Given current annual usage and the rate at which it has risen over the past 4 years, we expect NSG users to need about 10,000,000 core hours in 2017. <br><br>NSG is enabling participation by the wider neuroscience community in <br>research that would otherwise involve too great a computational burden, <br>such as large scale and detailed models of cells and networks, parameter <br>optimization, brain image processing, connectome pipelines etc., <br>resulting in over 50 publications and posters to date. <br><br>Many neuroscientists who are developing new network modeling tools, data <br>driven parameter optimization pipelines (such as the BluePyOpt from the <br>Human Brain Project) etc. are using the NSG to disseminate their results <br>to the neuroscience community. <br><br>NSG's scope has been expanded to offer programmatic access to <br>supercomputing resources in addition to access via the web portal. <br>Developing and operating the NSG has given us a unique opportunity to <br>understand and analyze how a very diverse range of neuroscientists are <br>using an environment like the NSG, and examine their growing need for <br>supercomputer power, as well as associated issues and needs for <br>collaboration, data sharing/management and various forms of computing