A Serverless Tool for Platform Agnostic Computational Experiment Management

TL;DR

Clowdr is a lightweight, platform-agnostic tool that simplifies the management, execution, and sharing of neuroscience experiments across HPC and cloud systems, bridging the gap between web portals and bare-metal solutions.

Contribution

It introduces Clowdr, a novel tool that streamlines experiment management and sharing in neuroscience, combining flexibility with ease of use across diverse computational environments.

Findings

Enables launching experiments on HPC and cloud systems.

Records detailed execution data for experiments.

Facilitates sharing of experimental summaries and results.

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 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.