The aim of the recently EU-funded MammoGrid project is, in the light of emerging Grid technology, to develop a European-wide database of mammograms that will be used to develop a set of important healthcare applications and investigate the potential of this Grid to support effective co-working between healthcare professionals throughout the EU. The MammoGrid consortium intends to use a Grid model to enable distributed computing that spans national borders. This Grid infrastructure will be used for deploying novel algorithms as software directly developed or enhanced within the project. Using the MammoGrid clinicians will be able to harness the use of massive amounts of medical image data to perform epidemiological studies, advanced image processing, radiographic education and ultimately, tele-diagnosis over communities of medical "virtual organisations". This is achieved through the use of Grid-compliant services [1] for managing (versions of) massively distributed files of mammograms, for handling the distributed execution of mammograms analysis software, for the development of Grid-aware algorithms and for the sharing of resources between multiple collaborating medical centres. All this is delivered via a novel software and hardware information infrastructure that, in addition guarantees the integrity and security of the medical data. The MammoGrid implementation is based on AliEn, a Grid framework developed by the ALICE Collaboration. AliEn provides a virtual file catalogue that allows transparent access to distributed data-sets and provides top to bottom implementation of a lightweight Grid applicable to cases when handling of a large number of files is required. This paper details the architecture that will be implemented by the MammoGrid project.
The concept of coupling geographically distributed resources for solving large scale problems is becoming increasingly popular forming what is popularly called grid computing. Management of resources in the Grid environment becomes complex as the resources are geographically distributed, heterogeneous in nature and owned by different individuals and organizations each having their own resource management policies and different access and cost models. There have been many projects that have designed and implemented the resource management systems with a variety of architectures and services. In…
This paper discusses the hardware and software components of the Grid Computing system used to implement the Locus Algorithm to identify optimum pointings for differential photometry of 61,662,376 stars and 23,799 quasars. The scale of the data, together with initial operational assessments demanded a High Performance Computing (HPC) system to complete the data analysis. Grid computing was chosen as the HPC solution as the optimum choice available within this project. The physical and logical structure of the National Grid computing Infrastructure informed the approach that was taken. That app…
Since its introduction, the Grid computing paradigm has been widely adopted both in scientific and also in industrial areas. The main advantage of the Grid computing paradigm is the ability to enable, in a transparent way, the sharing and the coordination of several heterogeneous and large-scale distributed resources belonging to different institutional domains. One of its limitation is the lack of facilities for executing services. In fact, Grid computing has been traditionally used and improved for running computational-intensive or data-intensive applications. A service differs from this ki…
Grid computing is a distributed computing paradigm which aims to aggregate several heterogeneous and distributed resources, belonging to different and independent organizations, in a dynamic, transparent and coordinated way. Since its introduction, Grid computing has been successfully applied to solve several scientific challenging applications. Despite of the consolidation of many of its aspects, there are some issues that are still open. One of them is the transparency: in many real Grid systems, users still need to be aware of Grid computing, either for adapting their applications to this p…
