National Cancer Institute Develops A Research Cloud

When it comes to developing the business case for cloud computing at federal agencies, an early pioneer may be the example of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Dr. Kenneth Buetow is leading an effort to develop caBIG - an ambitious community cloud platform designed to connect researchers and medical staff across the United States.The caBIG architecture is based on an open-source platform that allows the collaboration and exchange of data among 60+ cancer centers as well as government, educational and private oncology institutes. The fundamental architecture is built around a web services framework that can present lower level services to organizations with less sophisticated systems with a key goal of effectively managing the overwhelming volume of data generated by biomedicine.

caBIG got off the ground by making substantial investments in the development of the initial technology. NCI went to the individual cancer centers and found common requirements for systems and interoperability around biomedical support. Instead of each center developing silo'ed information systems, a shared approach was taken using caBIG.

caBIG provides substantial context to a myriad of information and provides a standard way to translate disparate information. As a distributed, federated system; the ability to share and expose information is left up to the organization originating the data. That way, they can protect the information at the appropriate level. The key to the success of the project has been to leverage existing technology, like open source. caBIG uses Globus -the open source grid software, and layered components on top of that.