Speaker
With a forward look to future evolution, discuss the issues you have encountered (or that you expect) in using the EGEE infrastructure. Wherever possible, point out the experience limitations (both in terms of existing services or missing functionality)
The key target of our ongoing activities is the development of a
Grid-based platform
for the management of bioinformatics and medical informatics
data. The platform will
serve users through a Grid portal based on Enginframe product
from NICE,that has been
proved to be a reliable framework for interfacing Grid
applications. New tools
dedicated to medical data and metadata management will be
developed.GILDA testbed has
been used for testing.GILDA support has been revealed essential
for it.
Describe the scientific/technical community and the scientific/technical activity using (planning to use) the EGEE infrastructure. A high-level description is needed (neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references).
Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics are converging
disciplines. Today, traditional
clinical health records are going to evolve in a new branch often
identified as Bio
Medical Informatics in order to include genomic data for each
patient. Both genomic
and modern medical data acquisition and processing demand large
storage facilities
and harness lot of computing power. Distribution of data is a key
issue. Both
researcher and medical doctors require an ubiquitous access to
patient's data.
Report on the experience (or the proposed activity). It would be very important to mention key services which are essential for the success of your activity on the EGEE infrastructure.
Distributed medical imaging process of rare data has been proven
to be successful and
of clinician real interest. The unprecedented Grid possibilities
to access
distributed data in respect to key security and privacy features
has been proven to
be the “killer feature” of our previous EGEE experiences.The Grid
has been proven to
be useful also when low amount of CPU power is used,due to its
data and metadata
management functionalities.Activities to deploy test application
in production
contexts (hospitals) are already planned and will be carried out
in next months.There
is however still the need for low latency (realtime or
interactive) job execution
tools, where the CPU power is not relevant but the response time
is perceived as the
key factor. Medical doctors are demanding high responsive tools,
provided through
transparent, user friendly infrastructures. There is still the
need of a dedicated
framework for the deployment of bioinformatics and medical
informatics integrated
platforms
Describe the added value of the Grid for the scientific/technical activity you (plan to) do on the Grid. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community and the relevance for other scientific or business applications
Today EGEE provides enough computing power, storage resources and
security features
to guarantee adequate adoption of it in modern medical
distributed context.
Certificate based security and advanced feature on data and
metadata federation,
coupled with strong and fine grained security policies on users
and groups available
through VOMS, allow to replicate on a EGEE VO real world
organizations with their own
hierarchies. Distributed data storage and replication could
trigger the adoption of
all –online patients archives and health records-avoiding low
latencies in accessing
old patient data stored on magnetic or optic backup devices. The
cost per Gbyte and
the availability of low cost commodity hardware could help health
care providers in
defining new kind of storage management systems, without
concentrating patient
records on centralised data centre.EGEE data access utilities are
used to access data
remotely, reducing copies of data in conformance of most common
privacy medical issues
