Frontiers in Neuroinformatics (Mar 2019)
A Serverless Tool for Platform Agnostic Computational Experiment Management
Abstract
Neuroscience has been carried into the domain of big data and high performance computing (HPC) on the backs of initiatives in data collection and an increasingly compute-intensive tools. While managing HPC experiments requires considerable technical acumen, platforms, and standards have been developed to ease this burden on scientists. While web-portals make resources widely accessible, data organizations such as the Brain Imaging Data Structure and tool description languages such as Boutiques provide researchers with a foothold to tackle these problems using their own datasets, pipelines, and environments. While these standards lower the barrier to adoption of HPC and cloud systems for neuroscience applications, they still require the consolidation of disparate domain-specific knowledge. We present Clowdr, a lightweight tool to launch experiments on HPC systems and clouds, record rich execution records, and enable the accessible sharing and re-launch of experimental summaries and results. Clowdr uniquely sits between web platforms and bare-metal applications for experiment management by preserving the flexibility of do-it-yourself solutions while providing a low barrier for developing, deploying and disseminating neuroscientific analysis.
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