SDSC's Neuroscience Gateway Portal Adds REST Programmatic Access for Researchers
The Neuroscience Gateway portal, led
by researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer
Center (SDSC) at the University of California,
San Diego, has received funding to add new programmatic access to high-performance computing (HPC) resources for the computational neuroscience
community.
The Neuroscience Gateway (NSG) was originally funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2012 as a
science gateway for the computational neuroscience community. "Science gateways
provide easy access through Web based portals to advanced cyberinfrastructure
tools and resources that can significantly improve the productivity of
researchers," according to a news release from UC San Diego.
This new round of funding from the NSF and the United Kingdom's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research
Council (BBSRC) supports a collaboration between researchers at UC San
Diego, Yale University and University College London to add
Representational State Transfer (REST) services to the Neuroscience Gateway
project, which is now called NSG-R to include REST.
According to information from UC San Diego, adding REST programmatic access
to HPC "will allow users of neuroscience community projects such as Open Source
Brain (OSB), NeuroInformatics Framework (NIF), OpenWorm, ModelDB and others to
readily access advanced computational resources from their respective
Web sites."
"Currently, NSG users must still upload models, launch simulations
and download results — a process that involves many time-consuming, and
potentially error-prone steps," said Amit Majumdar SDSC's division
director for the Center's Data Enabled Scientific Computing division and
principal investigator of the NSG-R project, in a prepared statement. "We
plan to eliminate these steps by enabling on-demand, automated communication
between the gateway and researchers' familiar working environments."
The NSG-R project will be a free and open resource for the computational
neuroscience community. According to information from UC San Diego, it will
increase research productivity, expand use of large-scale computational
modeling, and enable large-scale neuronal modeling using HPC resources.
The project proposal was called, "Seamless Integration of Neuroscience
Models and Tools with HPC — Easy Path to Supercomputing for Neuroscience," and
received three separate funding awards, two from the NSF (1458840 and 1458495) and one
from the BBSRC (BB/N005236/1).
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].