Super excited to visit Wenzel Jacob and give the following talk in the context of the Visual Computing Seminars.
Blue Brain Brayns, A platform for high fidelity large-scale and interactive visualization of scientific data and brain structures
The Blue Brain Project has made major efforts to create morphologically accurate neurons to simulate sub-cellular and electrical activities, for example, molecular simulations of neuron biochemistry or multi-scale simulations of neuronal function.
One of the keys towards understanding how the brain works as a whole, is visualization of how the individual cells function. In particular, the more morphologically accurate the visualization can be, the easier it is for experts in the biological field to validate cell structures; photo-realistic rendering is therefore important. Brayns is a visualization platform that can interactively perform high-quality and high-fidelity rendering of neuroscience large data sets. Thanks to its client/server architecture, Brayns can be run in the cloud as well as on a supercomputer, and stream the rendering to any browser, either in a web UI or a Jupyter notebook.
At the Blue Brain project, the Visualization team makes intensive use of Blue Brain Brayns to produce ultra-high resolution movies (8K) and high-fidelity images for scientific publications. Brayns is also used to serve immersive visualization on the large displays, as well as unique devices such as the curved OpenDeck located at the Blue Brain office.
Brayns is also designed to accelerate scientific visualization, and to adapt to the large number of environments. Thanks to its modular architecture, Brayns makes it easy to use various rendering back-ends such as Intel's OSPRay (CPU) or NVIDIA's OptiX for example. Every scientific use-case such as DICOM, DTI, Blue Brain research, etc, is a standalone plug-in that runs on top of Brayns, allowing scientists and researchers to benefit from a high performance/fidelity/quality rendering system, without having to deal with the technical complexity of it.
Brayns currently implements a number of basic primitives such as meshes, volumes, point clouds, parametric geometries, and pioneers new rendering modalities for scientific visualization, like signed distance fields.
During this talk, I will explain the motivations behind the creation of the Brayns platform, give some technical insight about the architecture of the system and the various techniques that we already use to render datasets. I will also describe how new datasets, as well as rendering components (engines, shaders, materials, etc), can be added to the platform.
Links:
https://github.com/BlueBrain/Brayns
http://rgl.epfl.ch/courses/VCS18f
Incredibly happy and proud to have created the Blue Brain Project movie that is currently being displayed at the Centre Pompidou. A world class modern art museum located in Paris.
"Alors que l’intelligence artificielle semble avoir envahi tous les domaines industriels du monde contemporain, de la finance au domaine médical, des jeux aux objets à comportement, de l’architecture au militaire, cette situation n’a jamais été véritablement mise en relation avec l’histoire des neurosciences et de la neuro-computation. L’exposition « Neurones, les intelligences simulées » souligne la continuité des recherches d’artistes, d’architectes, de designers et de musiciens avec celle développées par les grands laboratoires scientifiques ou ceux du monde industriel. Dans le cadre de « Mutations/Créations ».
Making an image of the brain always is a challenge. The idea behind the cover image is to pay tribute to the amazing work initiated by Camillo Golgi back in the late 19th century. His discovery of a staining technique called black reaction changed the way one could visualize brain structures. Recent studies have shown that the aesthetic of images representing data visualization in neuro-science plays a significant role in the way those image are understood.
In the last years, computer technologies have improved dramatically, together with the field of computational neuro-science. Thanks to advanced computer graphics techniques, it is now possible to reconstruct realistic shapes of neurons from a set of points and radii describing the structure of the cell. Many of those data sets for single neurons can be found on the web. Combining them together and placing them in space makes it a simple way to imagine what regions of the brain could look like if they were to be seen using Golgi’s technique.
In the near future, it seems clear that realistic, physically based rendering of in-silico data will become a necessary tool to understand how the brain functions.
But if those new tools are very promising, one should not forget the work of the pioneers, and this is what this cover image is all about.
Based on the very cool shader toy from Inigo Quilez, I ported the code to ISPC and exploited the vertorized units of the CPU to render the Menger sponge in real time:
