Reusable Services from the neuGRID Project for Grid-Based Health Applications
This work addresses the problem of simplifying Grid-based infrastructure for medical researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Grid technologies without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the challenge of abstracting Grid middleware complexities for clinical research applications by designing reusable services, specifically within the neuGRID project, to provide generic functionality like querying, provenance, and pipeline services that integrate data and computing elements for neuroscientists.
By abstracting Grid middleware specific considerations from clinical research applications, re-usable services should be developed that will provide generic functionality aimed specifically at medical applications. In the scope of the neuGRID project, generic services are being designed and developed which will be applied to satisfy the requirements of neuroscientists. These services will bring together sources of data and computing elements into a single view as far as applications are concerned, making it possible to cope with centralised, distributed or hybrid data and provide native support for common medical file formats. Services will include querying, provenance, portal, anonymization and pipeline services together with a 'glueing' service for connection to Grid services. Thus lower-level services will hide the peculiarities of any specific Grid technology from upper layers, provide application independence and will enable the selection of 'fit-for-purpose' infrastructures. This paper outlines the design strategy being followed in neuGRID using the glueing and pipeline services as examples.