Advancements in the CBRAIN Platform through Integration of Community-Based Tools and Standards
Creators: name: Brown, Shawn T.
name: Rioux, Pierre
name: Beck, Natacha
name: Najmeh Khalili-Mahani
name: Czech, Candice
name: Taheri, Armin
name: Kiar, Gregory
name: Lecours-Boucher, Xavier
name: Makowski, Carolina
name: Quesnel, Darcy
name: Jean-Baptiste Poline
name: Adalat, Reza
name: Glatard, Tristan
name: Das, Samir
name: Evans, Alan C.
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2019
Subjects: Computational Neuroscience
Computing
Data analysis
Informatics
Workflows

description: <strong>Introduction</strong> Since 2009, CBRAIN, a collaborative, web-based research platform, has served a broad international community of researchers in performing large-scale data and computational neuroscience (Sherif, 2014). With over 800 users at 193 sites in 32 different countries and hosting over 60 software pipelines, CBRAIN has provided over 35 million CPU hours on computing resources around the world, including Stampede2 at TACC, the world's largest supercomputer dedicated to academic research. CBRAIN is a central component in the Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives infrastructure (HBHL, 2018) and the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP, 2018), which require new features connecting existing platforms (e.g. LORIS (Das, 2016), OpenNeuro (Gorgolewski, 2017), and BrainCode (Vaccarino, 2018), utilizing community-based standards (e.g. BIDS (Gorgolewski, 2016), Boutiques (Glatard, 2018), and CARMIN (Glatard, 2015)), and offering new usage modalities and interfaces. <strong>Methods</strong> CBRAIN's primary purpose is to provide an ecosystem that abstracts away the low-level details of data movement and computational execution on advanced research computing resources. CBRAIN provides an orchestration system consisting of a central control instrument, termed a Portal, which communicates and submit tasks to remote compute servers, called Bourreaux. Portals and Bourreaux access remote data resources through passive DataProviders.The CBRAIN platform provides a unifying service layer for access to remote computing resources around the world (e.g. Compute Canada, XSEDE, and the CCC-Axis). CBRAIN is a Ruby on Rails application, is completely open source (https://github.com/aces/cbrain) and provided as a service free of charge (https://portal.cbrain.mcgill.ca). Requirements from new national and international initiatives lead to developments increasing interoperability, functionality and usability supporting a wider community and integrating with a broader set of community-driven tools and standards. <strong>Results</strong> New features developed in the CBRAIN platform are: RESTful API: A fully documented and functional CBRAIN RESTful API is now available at https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis/prioux/CBRAIN/5.1.0 and allows projects to utilize CBRAIN as a backend technology. To promote a community standard, CBRAIN will support CARMIN, a common web API for remote pipeline execution, such that any CARMIN compliant tool can use CBRAIN as a backend without rewriting their package. Datalad and S3 Integration: A Datalad DataProvider provides an interface to move data from Datalad (Datalad, 2018) versioned resources into the CBRAIN ecosystem. A new S3 DataProvider provides data movement from cloud-based resources. BIDS Compatibility: Capitalizing on the BIDS standard, an automatic parallelization capability to ensure BIDSApps run efficiently. Provenance and error-handling are also available, and the user only needs to specify the BIDS-formatted input dataset and the pipeline to execute. Boutiques Integration: To enable computational pipelines to be discoverable and shareable, and ease the burden of integration and deployment, we have adopted the Boutiques JSON standard to define our computational pipelines and to pull new pipelines from the Boutiques Repository. New Interactive Interface: A user-focused, interactive and dynamic CBRAIN user-interface has been designed, built with React.js and GraphQL, interacting through the CBRAIN API to launch tasks and manage data, The UI is highly modular and can quickly be adapted to new user and visualization requirements over time. New modular visualizations have also been developed using React.js. <strong>Conclusions</strong> CBRAIN has for nearly a decade served as a platform for accomplishing large-scale, large-data neuroinformatics. The new implementations provide a connection to a larger community of neuroinformatics and scientific research and promote FAIR standards in computational science.
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