NeuroImage (Jan 2021)
The open EEGLAB portal Interface: High-Performance computing with EEGLAB
Abstract
EEGLAB signal processing environment is currently the leading open-source software for processing electroencephalographic (EEG) data. The Neuroscience Gateway (NSG, nsgportal.org) is a web and API-based portal allowing users to easily run a variety of neuroscience-related software on high-performance computing (HPC) resources in the U.S. XSEDE network. We have reported recently (Delorme et al., 2019) on the Open EEGLAB Portal expansion of the free NSG services to allow the neuroscience community to build and run MATLAB pipelines using the EEGLAB tool environment. We are now releasing an EEGLAB plug-in, nsgportal, that interfaces EEGLAB with NSG directly from within EEGLAB running on MATLAB on any personal lab computer. The plug-in features a flexible MATLAB graphical user interface (GUI) that allows users to easily submit, interact with, and manage NSG jobs, and to retrieve and examine their results. Command line nsgportal tools supporting these GUI functionalities allow EEGLAB users and plug-in tool developers to build largely automated functions and workflows that include optional NSG job submission and processing. Here we present details on nsgportal implementation and documentation, provide user tutorials on example applications, and show sample test results comparing computation times using HPC versus laptop processing.