An inside look at caBIG® Cloud Computing
HealthCare IT hosted caBIG® applications and caGrid
When you subscribe to our hosting service there are many different ways you can take advantage of what is available. You might choose to just use your caBIG® application to store the data associated with operating your laboratory or running your experiments and then decide to share the information with colleagues on caGrid. For example, imagine that the blue “user” in the upper left hand part of the diagram is using caTissue Suite to manage a biospecimen repository and wants to share the information about the collection with the community. When this person uses their internet browser to enter biobanking information into caTissue the information is stored on a server in our data center (see the blue server on the left). In addition, since they decided that to share some or all of the repository information with members of the community they would have exposed the data to caGrid (see thin blue lines from our server connected to blue columns on the grid). When information is posted to caGrid other authenticated grid users can discover that data and perform various functions with the data. By being a member of the grid community you could share information about what is in your biospecimen collection as well as learn about what others have in their collections. Alternatively, if you did not want to share your data on the grid, then there would not be a link between your server in our data center and caGrid (the thin blue lines would not exist and neither would the columns). The choice is yours to make – we are here to implement and support your decision.
The figure also shows that other researches from different institutions can put data on caGrid as well (see magenta color on the bottom right hand side of the slide). In the example above you would be able to see and explore the magenta data and the owner of the magenta data located someplace else and being supported by a different hosting provider could see your data. This is the power of the using the grid from a hosting model. You do not need to understand and interact with the detailed information technology infrastructure inside the “internet sphere” depicted at all. All the functions available to you can be accessed and controlled from your internet browser. Forget about the computers, maintaining and updating software, or keeping up with the latest security issues. All those things are just details inside the sphere – details we take care of for you.
As a final example, note that the “green” user in the upper right hand side of the diagram is using analysis software on data posted to the grid. Since this user is also a subscriber to our hosting service they can use a caBIG® application like caIntegrator on our servers and, when properly authenticated, they can also perform analysis on data that is only available through caGrid. This user is able to see both the blue and the magenta data and is using a server in our data center to analyze the data using from geographically distributed users. Not only does the green user not know where the data is stored but it is completely irrelevant. The data can be discovered and accessed (assuming you are an authenticated user) without having to know its location.
The beauty of cloud computing is that the burden of understanding and managing complexity associated with the underlying technology and infrastructure is removed from the user. The power of the caGrid is its unparalleled ability to share and exchange scientific information in a meaningful way. Combining the two concepts to produce a caBIG® hosting solution puts a powerful new tool in the hands of biomedical research.
To learn more about our caBIG® Computing Offerings click here.