caGrid

caGrid

Developer(s)	NCI's Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT), Ohio State University, University of Chicago's Argonne National Laboratory, SemanticBits LLC, Ekagra Software Technologies
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Grid computing, Web service
License	caBIG v2.0
Website	cabig.nci.nih.gov/workspaces/Architecture/caGrid

The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, or caBIG is an initiative of the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. The caGrid computer network and software support caBIG.

caBIG is a voluntary virtual informatics infrastructure that connects data, research tools, scientists, and organizations to leverage their combined strengths and expertise in an open federated environment with widely accepted standards and shared tools. Driven primarily by scientific use cases from the cancer research community, caGrid provides the core enabling infrastructure necessary to compose the Grid of caBIG. It provides the technology that enables collaborating institutions to share information and analytical resources efficiently and securely, while also allowing investigators to easily contribute to and leverage the resources of a national-scale, multi-institutional environment.

caGrid Core Infrastructure

Though caGrid is a suite of products, typically caGrid refers to the core Infrastructure.

Globus Toolkit

caGrid uses version 4.03 of the Globus Toolkit, produced by the Globus Alliance.

caGrid Portal

The caGrid Portal is a Web-based application built on Liferay Portal that enables users to discover and interact with the services that are available on the caGrid infrastructure. Portal serves as the primary visualization tool for the caGrid middleware, and provides a standards-based platform for hosting caBIG-related tools. It also serves as a caBIG information source. Through the caGrid Portal, users have instant access to information about caBIG participants, caGrid points of contact (POCs), and caGrid-related news and events.

Screenshot of portal

workflow

caGrid workflow uses:

• Active BPEL
• Taverna

Contributors

• Ohio State University
• University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory
• SemanticBits, LLC
• Ekagra Software Technologies

Criticism

In March 2011, the NCI published an extensive review of CaBIG (see [1], [2]), which included a long list of problems with the program, and recommended that most of the software development projects should be discontinued.

References

• "caGrid". https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/workspaces/Architecture/caGrid. 
• "caGrid 1.0: An Enterprise Grid Infrastructure for Biomedical Research". http://www.jamia.org/cgi/content/short/15/2/138. 
• "Enabling the Provisioning and Management of a Federated Grid Trust Fabric". http://bmi.osu.edu/publications_more.php?ID=881. 
• "Introduce: An Open Source Toolkit for Rapid Development of Strongly Typed Grid Services". http://bmi.osu.edu/publications_more.php?ID=858. 
• "caGrid: design and implementation of the core architecture of the cancer biomedical informatics grid". http://bmi.osu.edu/publications_more.php?ID=740. 
• "Combining the Power of Taverna and caGrid: Scientific Workflows that Enable Web-Scale Collaboration". http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MIC.2008.120. 

External links

• caGrid wiki
• caGrid gforge project
• caGrid Knowledge Center
• caGrid Portal

Components

• Introduce Toolkit, also a Globus Incubator Project
• Data Services
• Metadata
• Security
  • Credential Delegation Service (CDS)
  • Dorian
  • GAARDS
  • Grid Grouper
  • Grid Trust Service (GTS)
  • WebSSO - Web Single Sign-on component, based on JASIG CAS