Researchers from the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Health Sciences University presented the Phase 1 results of the NSF-funded “Exploring Clouds for the Acceleration of Science” (E-CAS) project to a scientific panel and the general public. This online presentation describes their efforts to decipher the brain's neural code through large-scale detailed simulation of cortical circuits. To achieve this they developed novel methods and exploited state-of-the-art supercomputing technologies on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including running simulations on 100k cores simultaneously.