EU Human Brain Project Releases Platforms to the Public

"Geneva, 30 March 2016 — The Human Brain Project (HBP) is pleased to announce the release of initial versions of its six Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Platforms to users outside the Project. These Platforms are designed to help the scientific community to accelerate progress in neuroscience, medicine, and computing.

[...]


The six HBP Platforms are:

• The Neuroinformatics Platform: registration, search, analysis of neuroscience data.
• The Brain Simulation Platform: reconstruction and simulation of the brain.
• The High Performance Computing Platform: computing and storage facilities to run complex simulations and analyse large data sets.
• The Medical Informatics Platform: searching of real patient data to understand similarities and differences among brain diseases.
• The Neuromorphic Computing Platform: access to computer systems that emulate brain microcircuits and apply principles similar to the way the brain learns.
• The Neurorobotics Platform: testing of virtual models of the brain by connecting them to simulated robot bodies and environments.

All the Platforms can be accessed via the HBP Collaboratory, a web portal where users can also find guidelines, tutorials and information on training seminars. Please note that users will need to register to access the Platforms and that some of the Platform resources have capacity limits."

   ... More in the official press release here.

 The HBP held an online release event on 30 March:

Prof. Felix Schürmann (EPFL-BBP, Geneva), Dr. Eilif Muller (EPFL-BBP, Geneva), and Prof. Idan Segev (HUJI, Jerusalem) present an overview of the mission, tools, capabilities and science of the EU Human Brain Project (HBP) Brain Simulation Platform:

A publicly accessible forum for the BSP is here:
https://forum.humanbrainproject.eu/c/bsp
and for community models
https://forum.humanbrainproject.eu/c/community-models
and for community models of hippocampus in particular
https://forum.humanbrainproject.eu/c/community-models/hippocampus

Released - BluePyOpt 0.2 : Leveraging OSS and the cloud to optimise models to neuroscience data

BluePyOpt

The BlueBrain Python Optimisation Library (BluePyOpt) is an extensible framework for data-driven model parameter optimisation that wraps and standardises several existing open-source tools. It simplifies the task of creating and sharing these optimisations, and the associated techniques and knowledge. This is achieved by abstracting the optimisation and evaluation tasks into various reusable and flexible discrete elements according to established best-practices. Further, BluePyOpt provides methods for setting up both small- and large-scale optimisations on a variety of platforms, ranging from laptops to Linux clusters and cloud-based compute infrastructures.

The code is available here:
https://github.com/BlueBrain/BluePyOpt
A preprint to the paper is available here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00500