title: From cosmos to connectomes: the evolution of data-intensive science.
abstract: The analysis of data requires computation: originally by hand and more recently by computers. Different models of computing are designed and optimized for different kinds of data. In data-intensive science, the scale and complexity of data exceeds the comfort zone of local data stores on scientific workstations. Thus, cloud computing emerges as the preeminent model, utilizing data centers and high-performance clusters, enabling remote users to access and query subsets of the data efficiently. We examine how data-intensive computational systems originally built for cosmology, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), are now being used in connectomics, at the Open Connectome Project. We list lessons learned and outline the top challenges we expect to face. Success in computational connectomics would drastically reduce the time between idea and discovery, as SDSS did in cosmology.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Data-Intensive Science and Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA; Department of Computer Science, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. Electronic address: randal@cs.jhu.edu.
authors.forename: Randal
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Burns
authors.affiliation: Institute for Data-Intensive Science and Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA; Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA; Institute for Computational Medicine, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
authors.forename: Joshua T
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Vogelstein
authors.affiliation: Institute for Data-Intensive Science and Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA; Department of Computer Science, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA; Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
authors.forename: Alexander S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Szalay
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D003201:Computers; D063132:Connectome / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007256:Information Systems; D012984:Software; D013223:Statistics as Topic / Q000379:methods*