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caGrid 1.4

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 1.4.


Software and Documentation Links

caGrid Installation Instructions caGrid Installation Instructions
caGrid Installer Install caGrid
caGrid Source Code Download caGrid Source code
caGrid Documentation caGrid Documentation
caGrid API Specifications caGrid API Specifications
caGrid Release Notes caGrid Release Notes
NCI CBIIT Download Site NCI CBIIT Download Site
caGrid Knowledge Center caGrid KC wiki
caGrid Technical Information caGrid wiki
caGrid GAARDS Architecture Specification caGrid GAARDS 1.3 Architecture Specification

Project Information for Developers

Reporting Bugs caGrid Bug Tracker
Feature Requests caGrid Feature Requests
Project Page caGrid Project Page
File Release Site caGrid File Release Site
Community Training Grid Community Training Grid Information

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 Technology, are:

Metadata Service NameDocumentationEnd-Point Reference
Global Model Exchange ServiceDocumentationEnd-Point Reference
Index ServiceDocumentationEnd-Point Reference
Metadata Model ServiceDocumentationEnd-Point Reference

Security Service NameDocumentationEnd-Point Reference
Authentication ServiceDocumentationEnd-Point Reference
Credential Delegation ServiceDocumentationEnd-Point Reference
Dorian ServiceDocumentationEnd-Point Reference
Grid Grouper ServiceDocumentationEnd-Point Reference
Grid Trust Service (Master)DocumentationEnd-Point Reference
Grid Trust Service (Slave)DocumentationEnd-Point Reference

Business Activity Service NameDocumentationEnd-Point Reference
Federated Query Processor ServiceDocumentationEnd-Point Reference
Taverna Workflow ServiceDocumentationEnd-Point Reference

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

  • Continuous Integration
  • caGrid 1.4 enhances support for the latest releases (versions 4.2 and 4.3) of the caCORE Software Development Kit (SDK) and Common Security Module (CSM).

  • Data Services
  • Data services in caGrid 1.4 now support CQL 2, the successor query language to CQL. CQL 2 adds numerous features frequently requested by the community, including associated object retrieval. Data services also provide optional support for the use of caGrid Transfer to retrieve results, which can significantly reduce the overhead of moving large results from the server to the client.

  • Introduce Toolkit
  • Introduce includes service upgraders, allowing service developers to easily update to and leverage caGrid 1.4.

  • Identifiers
  • An all new system and grid services have been created for caGrid 1.4 which enable an identifiers framework for uniquely identifying instances of data on caGrid.Identifiers Home.


    External Technologies Used by caGrid

    caGrid 1.4 leverages the following technologies:

    • 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)
    • Persistent URLs:PURLs are Web addresses or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) that act as permanent identifiers in the face of a dynamic and changing Web infrastructure.

    Contact

    For more information contact Application Support.


    Previous Releases

last modified 02-26-2013 05:50 PM