Neuroimaging genomics is an emerging field that provides exciting opportunities to understand the genetic basis of brain structure and function. The unprecedented scale and complexity of the imaging and genomics data, however, have presented critical computational bottlenecks. In this work we present our initial efforts towards building an interactive visual exploratory system for mining big data in neuroimaging genomics. A GPU accelerated browsing tool for neuroimaging genomics is created that implements the ANOVA algorithm for single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) based analysis and the VEGAS algorithm for gene-based analysis, and executes them at interactive rates. The ANOVA algorithm is 110 times faster than the 4-core OpenMP version, while the VEGAS algorithm is 375 times faster than its 4-core OpenMP counter part. This approach lays a solid foundation for researchers to address the challenges of mining large-scale imaging genomics datasets via interactive visual exploration.

The scope of this work involves the integration of high speed parallel computation with interactive, 3D visualization of the lattice-Boltzmannbased immersed boundary method for fluid-structure-interaction. An NVIDIA Tesla K40c is used for the computations while an NVIDIA Quadro K5000 is used for 3D vector field visualization. The simulation can be paused at any time step so that the vector field can be explored. The density and placement of streamlines and glyphs are adjustable by the user, while panning and zooming is controlled by the mouse. The simulation can then be resumed. Unlike most scientific applications in computational fluid dynamics where visualization is performed after the computations, our software allows for real-time visualizations of the flow fields while the computations take place. To the best of our knowledge, such a tool on GPUs for FSI does not exist. Our software can facilitate debugging, enable observation of detailed local fields of flow and deformation while computing, and expedite identification of 'correct' parameter combinations in parametric studies for new phenomenon. Therefore, our software is expected to shorten the 'time to solution' process and expedite the scientific discoveries via scientific computing.Keywords lattice Boltzmann method · the immersed boundary method · GPU computing · fluid structure interaction(FSI) · interactive simulation · real time visualization

Mnih’s seminal deep reinforcement learning paper that applied a Deep Q-network to Atari video games demonstrated the importance of a replay buffer and a target network. Though the pair were required for convergence, the use of the replay buffer came at a significant computational cost. With each new sample generated by the system, the targets in the mini batch buffer were continually recomputed. We propose an alternative that eliminates the target recomputation called TAO-DQN (Target Accelerated Optimization-DQN). Our approach focuses on a new replay buffer algorithm that lowers the computational burden. We implemented this new approach on three experiments involving environments from the OpenAI gym. This resulted in convergence to better policies in fewer episodes and less time. Furthermore, we offer a mathematical justification for our improved convergence rate.

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Visualization plays an important role in helping neuroscientist understanding human brain data. Most publicly available software focuses on visualizing a specific brain imaging modality. Here we present an extensible visualization platform, BECA, which employ a plugin architecture to facilitate rapid development and deployment of visualization for human brain data. This paper will introduce the architecture and discuss some important design decisions in implementing the BECA platform and its visualization plugins.