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What is Brainlife?

brainlife.io promotes engagement and education in reproducible neuroscience by providing an online, community-based platform where users can publish code (Apps) and Data while integrating HPC and cloud-computing resources to run Apps. brainlife.io also allows users to publish all of the research assets associated with their projects that are embedded in our cloud-computing environment and referenced by a single digital-object identifier (DOI). Our platform is unique because of its focus on supporting scientific reproducibility beyond open code and open data -- brainlife.io also provides fundamental smart mechanisms for what we call “Open Services.”

Below, you will learn about the main panel of tools you will encounter as soon as you log into brainlife.io. While these run-through are brief, you’ll learn much more about each feature as you review the rest of brainlife.io’s documentation.

If you have any questions, do not forget to reach out to us on the brainlife.io slack channel!

Apps

brainlife.io uses Apps to analyze data. Apps are small programs that can process data individually or be made part of a larger series of steps in a full data analysis workflow.

Anyone can develop, use, combine, and reuse Apps to build complex pipelines for customized brain data analyses on the platform. You can publish apps to be used privately or shared publicly with the brainlife.io community. Combining multiple Apps allows for high-throughput data processing and aggregation across thousands of datasets.

Projects

The best way to manage your data is with brainlife.io’s Projects feature. Here you can organize your datasets, perform data processing, and share results with your team by granting varying levels of access to members of your group. Projects can be public or private.

Publications

Once a Project is mature, the data is analyzed and all the derivatives generated, a portion of the Project can be made public via a brainlife.io publication. A brainlife.io publication creates a snapshot of your datasets and Apps archived on brainlife.io for at least 10 years. Anyone can access your publication page and download your datasets without logging or reuse the Apps and data on brainlife.io.

Datatypes

Think of brainlife Datatypes as the way brainlife Apps communicate. A Datatype defines the expected list of filenames or the directory structure that an App can use as input or generate as output. Typically, multiple Apps use the same Datatype to communicate through their input and output datasets and reuse data to generate more data derivatives. Datatypes help join Apps together to form a pipeline or workflows.

brainlife Datatypes are maintained by individual developers and are updated at https://github.com/brainlife/datatypes.

Datasets

Our Datasets feature offers more than 300 datasets that users can import. This feature was established as part of a project that brainlife.io is collaborating with DataLad on. brainlife.io’s Datasets feature allows you to select and import the DataLad datasets you need from our list.

Resources

We know it takes a lot of computing power to run workflows. That is why brainlife.io allows users to work with data and computers across a mix of cloud systems and high-performance computing clusters (HPC). Both brainlife.io users and compute resource providers can register a compute resource that is publicly available to the entire brainlife.io community or privately available to certain users.

Our compute resources are unique because, instead of running an entire workflow on a single resource, App developers can identify the best resource for each individual App by scoring brainlife.io’s compute resources on how well they work with each App. brainlife.io automatically keeps track of success rate and time to compute so that users can easily see how efficiently each resource processes data for each App.

Visualizations

Users can perform data visualizations on brainlife.io in the cloud instead of on their own computer, which means better security and data management. Data visualization gives users feedback on the quality of the results generated by Apps and pipelines. The visualizations allow users to run popular software for data visualization like FreeView, FSLview, or MRview. Users can additionally run GPU-rendered visualizations on the cloud through Docker and VNC. Similar to Apps, developers can contribute visualizations to the platform.

Are you ready to start using brainlife.io? Get started here!