High Performance Computing Cluster

This past summer and fall, my research partners built our own personal high performance computing cluster. Temple has its own cluster (Owls Nest) but it's always in heavy use by others around the university and so we're always scrapping for resources. So we built our own cluster. First we built a testbed cluster by lashing together a handful of surplus PCs and then we used that to spec out a formal HPC cluster that we paid about $27k for out of a grant.

The cluster is pretty awesome. Our student, Devin Trejo, put together a very comprehensive blog post on how the cluster was designed and built. You can read all about it here:
http://www.tdevin.com/2015-11-30-hpc-batch-processing/

Neural Engineering Data Consortium

I am proud to announce a new effort we are undertaking at Temple called the Neural Engineering Data Consortium. The NEDC is being founded to help bring the power of big data and competitive common evaluations to neural engineering. Efforts such as this have been very effective in organizing other data intensive research areas such as human language processing.

We have been planning this effort for a while, and we're now pleased to announce that we've raised an initial round of capital to support planning and development efforts. Specifically, we seek two main goals over the next year

1. Complete a planning exercise that will identify how the NEDC should be structured, administrated, resourced, and interfaced to the neural engineering community. A big part of this effort will be getting buy-in from different elements of the neural engineering community.
2. Develop a proof-of-concept big-data corpus comprising 20,000 clinical EEGs derived from archives at Temple University Hospital. This corpus will be released freely to the neural engineering community.

We have begun the process of explaining the NEDC to the community and soliciting their feedback and participation. Last week, I presented the NEDC to participants at the 5th International Brain Computer Interface Meeting in Monterey, California. We are also planning a presentation at the 6th International IEEE Neural Engineering Conference this fall in San Diego. Furthermore, we are hosting a one day symposium at the 2013 IEEE GlobalSIP Conference. That symposium will focus on big data and will have a mix of invited speakers and contributed papers.

Our paper from the BCI Meeting can be found here.

My slides from that same meeting can be found here.

For more information, feel free to email me directly: iobeid@temple.edu.