HCP Data now mirrored on Amazon Web Services

Author: Jenn Elam

Published: Feb 23, 2015

Study: HCP Young Adult

Human Connectome Project data from the current 500 Subjects + MEG2 Release is now available on the cloud through Amazon Web Services Public Data Sets initiative. This alternative way to accesss HCP image data allows users to process or analyze the data directly through Amazon Web Services, without having to download from ConnectomeDB or order Connectome in a Box drives.

The process of getting access to the HCP Amazon S3 bucket housing the data is easy, but does require an account on ConnectomeDB and the acceptance of HCP data use terms. Amazon S3 can be used for cloud-based HCP data processing (Amazon charges users for compute cycles) or as an alternative to Aspera for download of HCP data at no cost to the user (Note: in most cases, downloading HCP data through Amazon S3 WILL NOT be faster than Aspera-driven data download through ConnectomeDB). Information on setting up an AWS EC2 instance and processing is available here: How to connect to HCP data in Amazon S3.