Public Health Grid: Where are we now?
by Jay Jones
In the Spring 2008 issue, PHINews introduced the grid concept and presented the exciting research that has been going on in the NCPHI lab over the previous year (Grid technology: A search for the future of PHIN). For this issue, we spoke with Dr. Tom Savel, NCPHI Medical Officer and Program Lead for the Grid Initiative at CDC. Dr. Savel shared the innovative, groundbreaking grid research NCPHI continues to advance.When we last spoke, you were performing grid testing in the NCPHI lab: You’d set up a public
health grid (phGrid) environment,
 set up nodes, and you were getting ready for testing some of
the technology built from
National Institute of Health’s (NIH)
Cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG™)
initiative. How did it go?At that time, we were doing the initial research, which consisted of learning about the different aspects of caBIG™. We learned much from that initial work and found that given our unique public health requirements, it was best to focus on one of their sub-initiatives, caGrid. We’ve been leveraging open-source tools created by caGRID, and have been focusing on the development of robust public health services, as well as examining security, analysis, and visualization issues. |
What’s the difference between CaGrid and caBIG™?
caBIG™ is an information network enabling all constituencies in the cancer community–researchers, physicians, and patients–to share data and knowledge. The components of caBIG™ are widely applicable beyond cancer as well. The underlying service oriented infrastructure that supports caBIG™ is referred to as caGrid. Driven primarily by scientific use cases from the cancer research community, caGrid provides the infrastructure necessary for caBIG™. caGrid provides the technology that enables collaborating institutions to share information and analytical resources efficiently and securely, and it allows investigators to easily contribute to and leverage the resources of a national multi-institutional environment.
What is the status of CDC’s efforts?
We now know how to implement and turn on grid nodes. In the beginning, we just wanted our nodes to be seen on the grid. Next, we wanted to exchange files with other nodes. Now that we can exchange files, we need to do it securely. Once we can exchange files securely, we hope to leverage services on the grid so that we can perform analytics and visualization, for example. We’re also trying to build fast, easy installs. We want phGrid to be fast, powerful, and easy for the public health professional around the world who will one day use the myriad of applications and services available on the grid to support their daily activities.
In the not too distant future, PHGrid users will be able to access data stored all across the county—and eventually the world. And we hope they can do this as quickly and securely as they now do when they query a database located on their desktops.
| Are you working in a virtual community in the lab? We’re still working with the University of Pittsburg, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Columbia, the Universities of Utah, Washington,as well as many others. In a sense, we now have an informal grid Community of Practice (CoP). We use the phGrid website/blog to share information, and |
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| we interact on conference calls, and through emails, all pushing
toward trying to create an environment where we focus on grid research and then roll it into public health practice
across the country. On the site, you can see that there are already 17 services that are at some stage of |
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| development on the phGrid, some of which are in production. Now we’re working on a way to make the services visible to everyone on the grid. It’s a gradual maturation phase, and it’s a beautiful thing to watch evolve. | ||
When we last spoke, the Centers of Excellence (COE) were on their way to the NCPHI lab to meet with you and the PHGrid research team. How did that go?
They’ve performed wonderful work and have made tremendous progress in terms of examining their existing services and learning how to share them on a grid. We now have a lot of grid services that are available, but our challenge and goal is to prevent redundant services.
What do you think are some of the outcomes from the PHIN Conference concerning grid?
A major outcome was that we were all able to see the incredible work the CoEs have done. They’ve blown past us in many ways. It was a great chance to share what the next steps toward phGrid implementation will be. It looks like a lot of the grid community’s work will be leveraged for production very shortly. We’ve learned a lot; we need to publish what we’ve learned and slowly get these components ready for real-time production, which means making sure they adhere to CDC security measures.
What are the plans going forward?
We are currently working with CDC Governance about projected next steps, and supporting BioSense is one of our goals. The future of BioSense will include distributed computing.
We’re also excited about deploying and configuring a National Health Information Network (NHIN) node [called an "NHIN Gateway" by the NHIN folks] within the NCPHI Lab and testing connectivity between the NHIN Gateway and BioSense.
In addition to the required security measures, we also want to move from simple services, like a visualization service, to a very complicated computational grid where we will use hundreds of PCs to perform rapid analytics. We want to leverage the computational component of grid and not just the data sharing component. We’ll then reap the benefits of the true power of grid. We have only just begun to tap into the incredible power of grid technology.
For more information
Want more PHINews? Click the link below to download the latest issue.
PHINews, Volume 2, Issue
5 (11/24/2008)
