caGrid 1.2

caGrid brochure caGrid Introduction and Demonstration 27-minute Audio over Slides and Screencast (turn speakers on). You may also download the Power Point slides for this demonstration. caGrid consists of a number of tools. Demonstrations for three of these tools are provided here: caGrid Core Infrastructure: consisting of the core services, APIs, and tools. Introduce Demonstration caGrid Workflow Client: focusing on making workflows usable by the scientific community (early integration with Taverna). Taverna Use Demonstration caGrid Portal: providing a web-based application enabling discovery and interaction with the services that are available on the caGrid infrastructure. Portal Use Demonstration The goal of the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid caBIG™ is to develop applications and the underlying systems architecture that connects together data, tools, scientists and organizations in an open federated environment. To meet this goal, caBIG™ will bring together data from many and diverse data sources. caGrid is the underlying service oriented infrastructure for caBIG™. caGrid enables numerous complex usage scenarios, but its basic technical goals are to: enable universal mechanisms for providing interoperable programmatic access to data and analytics in caBIG™, create a self-described infrastructure wherein the structure and semantics of data can be programmatically determined, and provide a powerful means by which services available in caBIG™ can be programmatically discovered and leveraged. caGrid implements grid technologies and methodologies that enable local organizations to have ultimate control over access and management. The caGrid 0.5 test bed infrastructure was released in September 2005, and included the initial set of software tools to effectively realize the goals of caBIG™. caGrid 1.0, released in December 2006, provided the implementation of the required core services, toolkits and wizards for the development and deployment of community provided services, Application Programming Interfaces (API) for building client applications, and reference implementations of applications and services available in the production grid. caGrid 1.1, released in September 2007, included important security enhancements, based on the security policies and procedures drafted by the caBIG™ Security Working Group. The latest release, caGrid 1.2, represents the continued enhancement of the caGrid Enterprise Architecture. In addition to bug fixes and several new services, it exemplifies efforts toward closer integration within the caGrid Core infrastructure and with other caBIG™ components. For a complete description of the new features and improvements in caGrid 1.2, please see Key Enhancements, below.

Software and Documentation Links

Project Information for Developers

Production Grid

caGrid is designed such that one needn't hardcode the addresses of services: each running service registers itself to the Index Service, and registered services can then be discovered programmatically. In this sense, the Index Service is really the only service where a well known address is needed. However, in some cases it may be useful to know the address of core services.

The core caGrid infrastructure services, maintained by the NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Techhnology, are:

• Metadata Services
• Global Model Exchange Service
• Enterprise Vocabulary Service
• Cancer Data Standards Repository Service
• Index Service
• Security Services
• Master Grid Trust Service
• Slave Grid Trust Service
• Grid Grouper Service
• Dorian Service
• Authentication Service
• Credential Delegation Service
• Higher Level Services
• Federated Query Processor Service
• Workflow Service

Your starting point for monitoring and discovering services that are available in caGrid should be the caGrid Portal. This tool provides visual display of services on the caGrid infrastructure and institutions that are participating in the caBIG™ program.

The caGrid Portal also allows users to discover advertised caBIG™ grid services and query them for data of interest. The tool uses caGrid 1.2 supported grid APIs for browsing for advertised services, discovering services based on metadata and registered objects in Cancer Data Standards Repository (caDSR) and concepts from Enterprise Vocabulary Service(EVS) and querying the deployed services using the caBIG™ XML query language.

Key Enhancements

caGrid 1.2 represents another step in the evolution of caGrid to better address the requirements of the research community. It includes important new features and enhancements and is backwards compatible with 1.x versions of caGrid. A detailed listing of the changes from caGrid 1.1 can be found in the release notes, but highlights include:

• Usability Improvements

caGrid 1.2 adds a new component, caGrid Transfer Service, that provides a simplified approach towards building data services that need to handle large scale data queries. Also, the process of creating and deploying data services in Introduce Toolkit has been greatly improved to allow users to take advantage of such advanced mechanisms.

• Security

caGrid 1.2 continues to make major advancements in caGrid GAARDS security infrastructure. A new set of framework has been developed, called the Web Single Sign On (WebSSO) that provides an out-of-box comprehensive Single Sign On solution for Web applications that use the caGrid GAARDS framework. It includes the newly developed Credential Delegation Service, to support the delegation of grid credential between users and services in a seamless manner.

• Continuous Integration

caGrid 1.2 is integrated with the Apache Ivy build system to substantially improve dependency management of sub projects within the caGrid core infrastructure. Users will now have more control over the specific components needed for integrating their services with caGrid 1.2. The caGrid 1.2 also supports the latest releases (version 4.0) of caCORE Software Development Kit and Common Security Module.

• Workflow Improvements - Early Preview

caGrid 1.2 provides early preview of the ability to orchestrate caGrid services in a workflow using the Taverna workbench. Users can automatically download the caGrid plug-in from Taverna and use it develop workflows in the rich user interface provided by Taverna. The instructions on how to create a simple workflow using Taverna can be found in the caGrid users guide and on the caGrid wiki. This integration will be further enhanced in the future releases based on user feedback.

External Technologies Used by caGrid

caGrid 1.2 leverages the following technologies:

• Globus Toolkit: provides the core grid infrastructure and supports service deployment, registration, invocation and secure communication -From Globus Alliance
• Mobius Global Model Exchange (GME): provides grid repository for XML Schemas of strongly typed objects transferred on caGrid - From Ohio State University
• Cancer Data Standards Repository (caDSR): provides repository for Common Data Elements and UML models - From National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics
• Enterprise Vocabulary Services (EVS): provides controlled vocabularies - From National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics
• ActiveBPEL™: provides an open source workflow engine whose implementation follows the Business Process Execution Language standard. - From Active Endpoints, Inc.
• Grouper: provides ability to manage group information across integrated applications and repositories. – From Internet2
• Central Authentication Service: provides underlying core single sign–on framework used by WebSSO – From JA-SIG.
• Taverna: provides an open source workflow tool for designing and executing workflows - From The Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (UK)

User Information

Subscribe to the caGrid Users Listserv

Contacts

Krishnakant (Avinash) Shanbhag - Director, Core Infrastructure Engineering - NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology

Michael Keller - caBIG Architecture Workspace Lead - Booz Allen Hamilton

John Eisenschmidt - Project Manager, caGrid Core Infrastructure, caGrid Portal, caGrid Workflow - 5AM Solutions

Larry Brem - Technical Project Manager, caGrid - Science Applications International Corporation

Scott Oster - caGrid Core Infrastructure Lead Architect - Ohio State University

Joshua Phillips - caGrid Portal Architect - SemanticBits, LLC.

Ravi Madduri - caGrid Workflow Architect - Argonne National Laboratory

List of caGrid 1.2 Team Members

Previous Releases

• caGrid 1.1
• caGrid 1.0
• caGrid 0.5 - Desupported on or about January 1, 2008