Grid Computing & 'Open' Health Grids
Overview of Grid Computing
Grid computing provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to form the equivalent of a virtual 'super computer'. Grid computing utilizes the unused capacity of many separate computers connected by a network to solve large-scale computational problems. With grid computing, organizations can collaborate and pool both internal and trusted external computer resources to tackle projects that require an extremely large capacity of computing power.
Grid Computing Organizations
Some of the key organizations involved with grid solutions and activities include:
- Globus Alliance - www.globus.org
- HealthGrid - www.healthgrid.org
- Open Grid Forum (OGF) – www.ogf.org
- Open Science Grid (OSG) Consortium - www.opensciencegrid.org
- World Community Grid - www.worldcommunitygrid.org
Grid Computing Publications
The following are a few selected publications focused exclusively on grids that one should consider looking over:
- Primeur - http://primeurmagazine.com
- Grid Computing News - http://www.gridcomputingplanet.com/news/
- Journal of Grid Computing - http://www.springer.com/computer/communication+networks/journal/10723
Grids in Health Care
Grids are being used in healthcare in a number of ways. There are at least three types of grids that have emerged. There are: (1) computational grids being used to solve large-scale computation problems in healthcare research; (2) data grids that don’t share computing power but instead provide a standardized way to swap data internally and externally for data mining and decision support; and (3) collaborative grids that let dispersed users share information and work together on extremely large data sets.
Some specific examples of collaborative 'open' grid projects in the field of bioinformatics and health care include:
- BioSimGrid - www.biosimgrid.org
- Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) - http://cabig.nci.nih.gov
- BIRN Cardiovascular Research Grid - http://www.birncommunity.org/current-users/cvrg/
- Folding@Home - http://folding.stanford.edu
- Sealife Project - http://www.biotec.tu-dresden.de/sealife
- FightAIDS@Home - http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu
- Virolab Grid - http://www.virolab.org/about-virolab.html
Global collaboration, open solutions, and innovation (COSI) are key characteristics of grid projects. If you have been an active participant in a health care related grid project, tell us about it. Is there a specific project you would like us all to know about?
- COSI 'Open' Health
- Login to post comments
Comments
What about the BOINC platform?
From http://boinc.berkeley.edu/:
Volunteer computing What is volunteer computing?
Volunteer computing is an arrangement in which people (volunteers) provide computing resources to projects, which use the resources to do distributed computing and/or storage.
Volunteers are typically members of the general public who own Internet-connected PCs. Organizations such as schools and businesses may also volunteer the use of their computers.
Projects are typically academic (university-based) and do scientific research. But there are exceptions; for example, GIMPS and distributed.net (two major projects) are not academic.