Neuroscience through EBRAINS Research Infrastructure, expand your research though Workflows, and High-Performance Computing.
Description of the general focus of the symposium
EBRAINS is a European research infrastructure dedicated to advancing brain science by providing access to essential data, simulation tools, workflows, and computing resources. It fosters scalable, reproducible, and FAIR-compliant research. During this symposium, we’ll outline how EBRAINS assists users in designing, integrating, and deploying scientific workflows, illustrated by real-world use cases and examples. This approach encourages collaboration between tool developers and scientists to co-design solutions for reproducible deployment.
We will also give the participants the keys for knowing when to transition your workflow to high-performance computing (HPC), when it’s more effective to remain local or use a cloud-based solution, and the benefits of each option. Participants will gain insight into the available simulation engines (like TVB and NEST), data tools, and computing backends. We’ll share concrete examples of workflows leveraging HPC for large-scale brain simulations and present tools for monitoring, logging, and automating these processes.
EBRAINS also facilitates connections among researchers through community-driven showcases, user groups, support channels, and co-design meetings. This session aims to offer not merely a demonstration of our tools, but also a roadmap for how to get involved, seek support, and thrive within the EBRAINS ecosystem. For students, this is a valuable chance to learn how to standardize approaches to complex workflows, ensure reproducibility, and collaborate effectively within a shared infrastructure that scales with your research aspirations.
The primary goal of this symposium is to clearly illustrate how EBRAINS supports the standardization of scientific workflows, integrates with high-performance computing (HPC), and enhances reproducibility in research. We will explain how workflows are formalized and share the criteria necessary for scaling them effectively. Additionally, we will showcase selected use cases that highlight how EBRAINS resources have been successfully utilized. This session aims to provide young neuroscience researchers with tangible examples of how research translates into operational infrastructure, outlining the journey from researcher needs to established pipelines, while emphasizing the vital roles of co-design, liaison support, and DevOps practices. By the end of the symposium, attendees will gain a comprehensive understanding of how EBRAINS can serve not just as a suite of services but as a robust technical foundation for scalable, collaborative brain research.
Talks
Invited Speaker: Dr. Thorsten Hater, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich.
This session explores how scientific workflows are structured, supported, and executed within the EBRAINS infrastructure. Participants will learn how experimental scientific questions are transformed into operational pipelines that use simulation tools, atlas services, and computational resources such as HPC clusters or Neuromorphic Computing (NMC) systems.
We will focus on the workflow lifecycle, detailing explaining how a process starts with specific research needs, moves follows through collaborative design with developers, and culminates in sustainable and reproducible execution. The presentation will showcase examples of computational neuroscience workflows, illustrating how researchers interact with various EBRAINS components and the EBRAINS Software Distribution (ESD) through both the user interface and JupyterLab.
Additionally, we will outline our support processes, covering on-boarding procedures, documentation practices, and methods for gathering feedback. The advantages of a unified infrastructure include consistent practices across teams, scalability through high-performance computing and cloud solutions, and adherence to FAIR principles.
Attendees will gain insight into how collaborative methodologies, DevOps pipelines, and community support systems come together to create an effective environment for conducting, preserving, and expanding modern neuroscience research.
This session will introduce the EBRAINS Research infrastructure. Detailing both the science, platform, and base infrastructure tools and services. Starting with a short overview of the history of the project, we will dive into the details of the architecture and how the different components come together into this most advanced research infrastructure for brains research in Europa.
MSc. Wouter Klijn, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich.
In this session we will guide you through one of the Co-design activities available in EBRAINS. Translating your science ideas into implementation can be complex. The Science Support Team has developed several tools to streamline this process. After a short introduction we will have a hands-on formalization session with experts available to help you in the process of formalizing your science.
Remote in coordination with MSc. Wouter Klijn will be Dr. Murugan, Jithu.
In this final session we provide you with insights as learned from the Co-Design processes of migrating an existing computation workflow to a second supercomputer system. Information from the three previous session feeds into this talk. showcasing how different tools and activity of EBRAINS come together to create production level operational workflows.
Remote in coordination with Wouter Klijn will be Dr. Ekaterina Zossimova.
This session will provide an overview of the HPC services available via EBRAINS-RI, a basic introduction to how to use the advanced computing services. It will finish with a short-on session aiming to run your first code on the JSC's HPC services using Jupyter-Lab.
Dr. Krishna Kant Singh, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich.
This session will provide an overview in Arbor, a performance-portable library for the simulation of large networks of multi-compartment, morphologically detailed neurons on emerging HPC architectures. And how these simulations perfectly fit and scale on HPC usage.
Dr. Thorsten Hater in remote coordination with Dr. Han Lu. Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich.
Event Details
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