Title: A Serverless Tool for Platform Agnostic Computational Experiment Management,
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.