caGrid 1.3

The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid®, or caBIG®, is a voluntary, virtual, informatics infrastructure; it connects data, research tools, scientists, and organizations to leverage their combined strengths and expertise in an open, federated environment. caGrid is the underlying service-oriented infrastructure that supports caBIG®. Driven primarily by scientific use cases from the cancer research community, it provides the core infrastructure necessary to compose the Grid of caBIG®. caGrid provides the technology that enables collaborating institutions to share information and analytical resources efficiently and securely, while also allowing investigators to easily contribute to and leverage the resources of a national-scale, multi-institutional environment. Please see the Key Enhancements section below for a description of the enhancements in caGrid 1.3.

Software and Documentation Links

Project Information for Developers

The caBIG® Production Grid

Each caGrid service registers itself to a central Index Service, eliminating the need to hardcode addresses. The Discovery Client enables programmatic discovery of services, only the Index Service's well known address is needed. However, in some cases it may be useful to know the address of core services.

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

The caGrid Portal, which provides a visual display of caBIG® services and participating institutions, is a starting point for discovering data of interest. Portal uses grid APIs to browse for advertised services, discovering services based on metadata and registered objects in the Cancer Data Standards Repository (caDSR) and concepts from the Enterprise Vocabulary Service (EVS). Portal also supports querying deployed services using the XML-based caGrid query language, CQL.

Key Enhancements

The caGrid 1.3 release further expands the infrastructure and tooling to support use cases from the scientific community. It is backwards compatible with 1.x versions of caGrid, and includes many exciting new features and enhancements. A detailed listing of the changes from caGrid 1.2 can be found in the release notes, but highlights include:

• Continuous Integration

caGrid 1.3 enhances support for the latest releases (version 4.1.1) of the caCORE Software Development Kit (SDK) and Common Security Module (CSM). caGrid and the caCORE SDK now share a common code base for CQL. In addition, caGrid 1.3 supports the most recent web services containers in the NCI CBIIT Technology Stack (Tomcat 5.5 and JBoss 4.0.5).

• Data Services

Significant enhancements to the Federated Query Processor (FQP), allowing a single, semantic query to execute across multiple caGrid services and return a single result set. FQP now supports WS-Notification, querying secure grid services via the caGrid Credential Delegation Service (CDS), configurable query execution parameters to allow only partial results to be returned, and out-of-band results using the caGrid Transfer Service and WS-Enumeration.

• Introduce Toolkit

The Introduce Toolkit has a number of security-related enhancements, adding fine-grain control over authorization using the caCORE Common Security Module (CSM) and Grid Grouper. Introduce also includes service updaters, allowing service developers to easily update-to and leverage caGrid 1.3.

• Metadata Services

The Mobius Global Model Exchange (GME) has been entirely rewritten for caGrid 1.3 to support the Semantic requirements of caBIG® software developers. The caGrid-developed caDSR grid service, based on the caCORE 3.1 API, has been deprecated, It has been replaced by the caDSR 4.0 data service (maintained by the caDSR team), and a new caGrid Metadata Model Service (MMS), whose purpose is creation and semantic annotation of caGrid metadata models using caDSR-derived data.

caGrid 1.3 also features a refactored Globus Index Service that employs an embedded XML database in lieu of the former in-memory model. It includes several design improvements for increased performance and scalability. The caGrid team thanks and acknowledges the Globus development team for contributing this important enhancement.

• Security

Enhancements to the GAARDS infrastructure include support for multiple authentication profiles, including one-time passwords. Trusted Identity Providers can now be discovered programmatically, allowing full realization of federated authentication use cases. Auditing support has also been added to Dorian, giving systems administrators the degree of control they have requested.

• Taverna Workflow

Orchestration of caGrid services is supported in this release through joint development with the Taverna project. The caGrid plug-in for the Taverna 2.0 workbench allows development of workflows using their rich user interface.

External Technologies Used by caGrid

caGrid 1.3 leverages the following technologies:

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

Contacts

List of caGrid 1.3 Team Members

Previous Releases

• caGrid 1.2
• caGrid 1.1
• caGrid 1.0
• caGrid 0.5