The Connectome

The overall goal of the Connectome project is to map, store, analyze and visualize the actual neural circuitry of the peripheral and central nervous systems in experimental organisms, based on a very large number of images from high-resolution microscopy. The proposing team from the Center for Brain Sciences has already demonstrated its capacity for, and expertise in, high-throughput imaging. The critical challenges are computational, as the total number of voxels needed to establish the Connectome is ~1014. The principal challenges are to develop: (a) algorithms for efficient 3D segmentation circuitidentification (b) the ability to transfer, store and analyze 3D images in multi 100GB range; and (c) scalable database techniques to store, manage and query multi-TB, multi-modal datasets.  Read more…

Murchison Widefield Array Processing Pipeline

The Murchison Wide-field Array is a next-generation radio telescope being built in Australia to study the early universe, the sun, space weather, and time variability of the radio sky. Cosmologists will use the MWA to map matter in the Universe during the Epoch of Reionization soon after the Big Bang, when the earliest stars, galaxies, and quasars formed. That is the MWA’s job by night, when the environment is most radio quiet. The MWA’s job by day will be mapping the Sun, with particular focus on solar storms and the ever-changing solar magnetic field that shapes those storms and in turn determines space weather around Earth. And when not looking at the early universe or the Sun, the MWA will map the radio sky in the first systematic search for variability, as from supernovae, planets, etc. The discovery space is huge. Read more…

Quantum Chemistry Calculations

The Aspuru-Guzik group is pushing the boundaries of quantum chemistry by exploring the use of graphical processing units (GPUs) to accelerate calculations for the prediction of chemical phenomena ranging from complex enzyme mechanisms to the design of new materials.  Read more…