Alexander Peyser

Michael Schirner, Lia Domide, Dionysios Perdikis et al.

The Virtual Brain (TVB) is now available as open-source cloud ecosystem on EBRAINS, a shared digital research platform for brain science. It offers services for constructing, simulating and analysing brain network models (BNMs) including the TVB network simulator; magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) processing pipelines to extract structural and functional connectomes; multiscale co-simulation of spiking and large-scale networks; a domain specific language for automatic high-performance code generation from user-specified models; simulation-ready BNMs of patients and healthy volunteers; Bayesian inference of epilepsy spread; data and code for mouse brain simulation; and extensive educational material. TVB cloud services facilitate reproducible online collaboration and discovery of data assets, models, and software embedded in scalable and secure workflows, a precondition for research on large cohort data sets, better generalizability and clinical translation.

Wouter Klijn, Sandra Diaz-Pier, Abigail Morrison et al.

Running scientific workflows on a supercomputer can be a daunting task for a scientific domain specialist. Workflow management solutions (WMS) are a standard method for reducing the complexity of application deployment on high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. We introduce the design for a middleware system that extends and combines the functionality from existing solutions in order to create a high-level, staged user-centric operation/deployment model. This design addresses the requirements of several use cases in the life sciences, with a focus on neuroscience. In this manuscript we focus on two use cases: 1) three coupled neuronal simulators (for three different space/time scales) with in-transit visualization and 2) a closed-loop workflow optimized by machine learning, coupling a robot with a neural network simulation. We provide a detailed overview of the application-integrated monitoring in relationship with the HPC job. We present here a novel usage model for large scale interactive multi-application workflows running on HPC systems which aims at reducing the complexity of deployment and execution, thus enabling new science.