The open connectome project data cluster

Abstract

- neural connectivity maps of the brain-using the parallel execution of computer vision algorithms on high-performance compute clusters. These services and open-science data sets are publicly available at openconnecto.me. The system design inherits much from NoSQL scale-out and data-intensive computing architectures. We distribute data to cluster nodes by partitioning a spatial index. We direct I/O to different systems-reads to parallel disk arrays and writes to solid-state storage-to avoid I/O interference and maximize throughput. All programming interfaces are RESTful Web services, which are simple and stateless, improving scalability and usability. We include a performance evaluation of the production system, highlighting the effec-tiveness of spatial data organization.