Gridifying Neuroscientific Pipelines

Abstract

In recent times, innovative new e-Infrastructures have materialized all around the globe to address the compelling and unavoidably increasing demand on computing power and storage capacity. All fields of science have entered an era of digital explosion and thus need to face it with appropriate and scalable instruments. Amongst century’s cutting-edge technologies, the grid has become a tangible candidate which several initiatives have harnessed and demonstrated the added value of. Turning the concept into a concrete solution for Neurosciences, the neuGRID project aims to establish a grid-based e-Infrastructure providing neuroscientists with a powerful tool to address the challenge of developing and testing new markers of neurodegenerative diseases. In order to optimize the resulting grid and to deliver a user-friendly environment, neuGRID has engaged the process of migrating existing imaging and data mining toolkits to the grid, the so-called gridification, while developing a surrounding service oriented architecture of agnostic biomedical utilities. This chapter reports on a preliminary analysis of the issues faced in the gridification of neuroimaging pipelines and attempts to sketch an integration model able to cope with the several and heterogeneous applications used by neuroscientists.