caGRID

 

cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid

 

caGrid is the backbone infrastructure of the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG®). It is composed of a set of servers operated by National Cancer Institute (NCI) and participanting research institutions in the caBIG® program.  These servers use caGrid's networking application (also called caGrid) to communicate with each other.  Collectively, they form a large, distributed, interconnected computing grid.    

When you subscribe to one of the grid-ready caBIG® applications that we support, your subscription will automatically include a caGrid service interface. The service interface allows users on the grid to access your sharable data.  We will take care of installing the caGrid service interface prerequisites and will complete the configuration work.  We will also test the connection to make sure that your application can connect to the grid.  Depending on the application you select, you may need to complete some registration and set-up tasks using the administrative tools provided with caGrid.  Review our offering details for more information. 

Here are a few more details about caGrid excerpted from the caBIG® community website:

Although caGrid is built upon standard grid technologies such as the Globus Toolkit and obeys community standards (e.g., W3C, Oasis, and OGF), it goes well beyond the use of basic grid technology by creating a framework for and enforcement of the use of specialized models and controlled vocabularies which have been developed to meet the research needs of the cancer community. The existence of published and controlled data standards and vocabularies allows technologies to be implemented that facilitate, among other things, semantic discovery. In a system as complex as our national cancer research and treatment enterprise, being able to find the information you need when you need it becomes a critical problem. caGrid is the solution to sharing information among the research institutions and researchers involved in the cancer enterprise. An excellent overview of caGrid and its associated authentication and security models can be found at the caGrid Wiki.

As stated above, caGrid is the underlying network architecture that provides the basis for connectivity between all of the cancer community institutions, allowing research groups to tap into the rich collection of emerging cancer research data while supporting their individual investigations. caGrid manages and securely shares information and analytic resources using locally managed access control policies and by using strongly typed data objects in XML format.

Features include:

  • Nationally-deployed, standards compliant, data and analysis grid that any caBIG® compatible system can plug into or draw from
  • Semantically-discoverable and described services
  • Rich run-time metadata infrastructure
  • Uniform data query and retrieval across systems
  • Federated security and identity management to support controlled access to systems
  • Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) workflow engine for data analysis pipeline construction and execution
  • Federated, cross-domain data mining and integration
  • Standardized programming interfaces for application developers

For a more detailed look at caGrid can be used in combination with our managed Hosting solutions click here.