Reusable Services from the neuGRID Project for Grid-Based Health Applications

TL;DR

The paper discusses the development of reusable, generic services within the neuGRID project to support neuroscientists by abstracting Grid middleware complexities, enabling flexible and application-independent medical research workflows.

Contribution

It introduces a design strategy for creating modular, reusable services that abstract Grid middleware details for medical applications in neuGRID.

Findings

Services integrate data and computing sources into a unified view

Lower-level services hide specific Grid technology details

The approach enables application independence and infrastructure flexibility

Abstract

By abstracting Grid middleware specific considerations from clinical research applications, re-usable services should be developed that will provide generic functionality aimed specifically at medical applications. In the scope of the neuGRID project, generic services are being designed and developed which will be applied to satisfy the requirements of neuroscientists. These services will bring together sources of data and computing elements into a single view as far as applications are concerned, making it possible to cope with centralised, distributed or hybrid data and provide native support for common medical file formats. Services will include querying, provenance, portal, anonymization and pipeline services together with a 'glueing' service for connection to Grid services. Thus lower-level services will hide the peculiarities of any specific Grid technology from upper layers, provide application independence and will enable the selection of 'fit-for-purpose' infrastructures. This paper outlines the design strategy being followed in neuGRID using the glueing and pipeline services as examples.