Ron at the University of Utah has been guiding us in our exploration of some of the caGRID tools. He generously shared an Eclipse project that contained a grid client to access the a data grid service at Utah. Dave was able to get this up and running in a matter of minutes with no issues. This is good news for our new relationship with the caGRID tools!

-Becky

We have two machines set up as Grid nodes. A production and a development machine. Svend successfully completed the following:

1. Installed the software
2. Requested a certificate
3. Installed the certificate
4. Completed a file transfer to validate the certificate (both acting as a server and as a client, the file was a simple text file)
5. Installed the location service that sends the GPS location to the PH Grid

We are continuing to discuss the next steps and the developers are looking into ways to “gridify” some of our existing web services. In addition, we’ve been reading a bit about “Introduce” (http://www.springerlink.com/content/u301u225wg5356w3/fulltext.pdf ) and learning more about the caBIG infrastructure from conversations with other Grid developers.

It seems that on a Grid, the overhead for creating WSDL files and doing some of the other work to get a service ready for the Grid are much more labor intensive (because more is done manually) than for traditional web services.

We are now exploring caBIG resources, Introduce, and working towards getting access to a data service at a Utah Grid node.

-Becky

Last week caBIG had their annual meeting. Unfortunately, none of us were able to make it to DC but I did hear some reports from the Population Sciences SIG about one particularly interesting presentation by Noshir Contractor of Northwestern University.  His group has been working on population research using the grid focused on population level tobacco data , tobacco data collection intstruments and caGrid. The powerpoint from Dr. Contractor is posted here: http://www.iknowinc.com/~nosh/2008%206%20PopSciGrid.ppt 

It seems that some of the benefits of Grid technology for pop sci highlighted by this presentation focus more on some of the things we’ve been focusing on (data sharing and security) and not as much on sharing of computational resources.

-Becky

No sooner did we decide to create this blog (see the “about this blog” page to learn why), than Svend mentioned that there was already a phgrid.blogspot.com (also, and more conveniently at phgrid.net). Somehow that had escaped my atention, but its pretty interesting…

(We’ll keep on w/ this one, though, as our focus is really on what we are doing at University of Washington as part of the PH Grid, not on the overall PH Grid activities or partners)

– Bill