Brayns is a visualizer that can interactively perform high-quality and high-fidelity rendering of neuroscience large data sets. It provides an abstraction of the underlying rendering engines, so that the best possible acceleration libraries can be used for the relevant hardware (CPU or GPU). 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.
Why Brayns?
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. Brayns is a new visualization platform that can be used for large-scale and interactive ray tracing of all kinds of scientific data.
The interactive ray tracing can highlight areas of the circuits where cells touch each other and where synapses are being created. In combination with ‘global illumination,’ which uses light, shadow, and depth of field effects to simulate photo-realistic images, this technique makes it easier to visualize how the neurons function.
Brayns provides an abstraction of the underlying rendering engines, so that the best possible
acceleration libraries can be used for the relevant hardware. As a minimalistic library that
allows optimized ray tracing rendering of meshes and parametric geometry, Brayns makes it
possible to use the best rendering engine depending on the case.
Scalability
- Designed for large scale datasets (tens of thousands of neurons, TB of simulation data)
- Scalable Distributed system (from consumer PC to supercomputer)
- Remains interactive, even for very complex datasets
- Suitable for caves and high resolution displays (40 MPix) via parallel renderingLarge volumes (TB of data with BBIC format, 8bit, 16bit, floats, etc)
Research oriented
- Research oriented modular architecture
- Easy experimentation since every scientific use-case is a plug-in that does not affect the rest of the system
- Modular framework with C++, Python and Javascript APICurrently implements plug-ins for circuit simulation, topology, brain atlas, diffusion tensor imaging, volume rendering, morphology collage, interactive touch detection, and molecular systems
Ease of deployment
- Client/Server architectureCloud ready via containers like DockerHardware agnostic (GPU/CPU)
Advanced rendering
- Custom virtual cameras for any type of display (cylindric stereo, VR, etc.)
- Advanced geometry (signed distance field, streamlines, meshes, parametric geometry, point clouds, etc.)
- High fidelity rendering with physically accurate light transport
- Photorealistic rendering (global illumination, camera lens effects)Scene management (visibility, bounding boxes, transformations)
