AWS enables scaling for neuroscience research

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has facilitated a solution enabling scalability and acceleration for neuroscience research applications at the Janelia Research Campus. HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus is leveraging AWS to speed up scientific discovery in applications requiring enhanced data and computational power.

The neuroscience application involves computationally intensive image searches with unpredictable usage patterns. The conventional on-premises approach requires a powerful workstation and downloading large datasets to local storage, with typical searches taking 30 seconds for 50,000 images. A serverless architecture using AWS Lambda performs the same task in seconds for cents per search.

Neuroscience research, particularly on fruit flies, demands immense data and computational power to study the approximately 100,000 neurons in a fruit fly brain. Janelia's NeuronBridge tool utilizes AWS cloud computing capabilities to accelerate scientific advancement.

Traditionally, searching 50,000 images took 30 seconds on a 16-core workstation. With AWS, the same task is completed in seconds at a significantly lower cost per search, while also enabling the handling of larger datasets.