The Neuroscience Gateway

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The NSF funded Neuroscience Gateway (NSG) has been in operation since the early 2013. We originally designed NSG to reduce technical and administrative barriers that exist to using high performance computing resources for computational neuroscientists. In the last two years, in addition to computational neuroscientists, cognitive and experimental neuroscientists are also using NSG. Currently NSG has over 600 registered users and it is steadily growing. Users can access NSG via a web portal and via RESTful programmatic access. A particular usage mode of programmatic access to NSG enables users of community neuroscience projects such as the Open Source Brain, research projects within the European Human Brain Project and others to access HPC resources via NSG without having to obtain their own accounts on NSG. Based on demand and usage, over the last five years we have successfully acquired increasingly larger allocations (millions to ~ten million core hours) on resources of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program via the competitive peer review process. We will discuss the overall NSG architecture. We implemented NSG from the generic CIPRES science gateway software to create the NSG specifically for the neuroscience community. We will describe the front end user interface, based on web portal and RESTful programmatic access, and the backend architecture. We will discuss how NSG is evolving over time in response to the interests and needs of the neuroscience community, adapting itself to become a dissemination platform for new tools and pipelines, and becoming an environment for modelers and experimentalists to jointly develop models.