Global Bio Grid

From VCGR Wiki

Contents 1 Overview 2 GBG In Action 3 Global Bio Grid Publications

Overview

One of the founding motivations for the the Virginia Center for Grid Research (VCGR) was that the life sciences are an excellent application for Grid computing and the VCGR is commited to transforming life sciences research, application, and clinical care by providing the tools to Grid-enable the life sciences-related activities.

The center has the following specific objectives:

1. Develop and deploy the Global Bio Grid (GBG), a data, computational, and algorithmic infrastructure for the life sciences. The GBG provides a shared, secure infrastructure for collaboration and research across academic, government, and industrial institutions — and across the spectrum of life sciences applications.
   
2. Perform Research on dependable Grid and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Grid computing technology is still in it’s infancy and many problems remain. Particular areas that we will focus on are data access, security (confidentiality, data integrity, access control, policy negotiation), dependability (availability, SLA’s, policy languages), and grid standards.
   
3. Develop new algorithms, tools, and techniques for hierarchical data integration and analysis.
   
4. Reach out to the life sciences community. The goal os to both accelerate their science and to better understand their requirements and special needs.
   

GBG In Action

The Global Bio Grid will be deployed in three broad phases over the next five years. The first phase, which is already partially under way, is designed to provide researchers with state-of-the-art tools as soon as possible. The two later phases will be to deploy the new state of the art software, including software both developed as part of this proposal as well as developed by venders and others in the grid and biological sciences community.

Phase I focuses on getting technology into the hands of researchers and providing access to data and computational resources otherwise unavailable to them or difficult to maintain by them. This phase of the project, which will rely upon such existing grid solutions as Platform LSF MultiCluster&tm; and Avaki Data Grid&tm;, is already partially in place. The GBG Data Grid is up and running with partner sites including UVa, ETH Zurich, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), and Texas Tech.

To browse this data grid, log in to:

Grid Domain:	UVaCenturionGrid
Authentication Service:	DefaultAuthService
User Name:	gbg-guest
Password:	guest

Global Bio Grid Publications

• "Grid-Based File Access: The Avaki I/O Model Performance Profile", H. Huang, and A. S. Grimshaw, Computer Science Technical Report, University of Virginia, CS-2004-25, September, 2004.

• "The Global Bio Grid at Virginia", A. S. Grimshaw, G. Robins, M. Humphrey, and M. Morgan, Computer Science Technical Report, University of Virginia, CS-2004-27, September, 2004.

• "Caching Medical Information for Performance", M. Morgan, and A. S. Grimshaw, Computer Science Technical Report, University of Virginia, CS-2004-26, September, 2004.