caGrid article

An article on iSGTW describes the National Institutes of Health's cancer biomedical information grids (caBIG) project and its caGrid infrastructure. Not too much new information relative to previous posts, but a good reminder of the nice work that this group is doing. The event that spurred this article is the recent release of caGrid 1.1.

Interestingly, recent articles note that cancer rates continue to decline in the US, but increase worldwide--to and estimated 15 million new cases by 2020. That's a lot of people, emphasizing the importance of this work.

From a technology perspective, caBIG and caGrid are exciting because of the extensive and powerful use they make of the Web Services infrastructure developed over the past several years. In particular, I can't resist pointing out that the entire infrastructure is based on Globus software, and in particular its implementation of the WSRF, WS-Notification, WS-Addressing, security, and related specifications.