PART 1 – The Empirical Picture
4.12 MediGrid
Case Overview
What does the project do mainly? The MediGrid project was started in 2005 as part of the D-Grid initiative financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
MediGRID consists of thee modules in representative arenas of biomedical research: image processing, biomedical computer science, clinical research. In these areas, each four
methodical modules (middleware, ontology tools, resource fusion and eScience) are applied.
Exemplarily applications from the three research areas were transmitted to the prototypical Grid structures. The aim of MediGRID was to develop Grid technologies for the testbed use in medical and biomedical research.
Motivations for setting it up: The project’s primary motivation was developing Grid
technologies. Medical and biomedical research was considered to be a field of application that could benefit to a great extent from the Grid computing technology. In a joint initiative with German research and industry, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the development of D-Grid. The first D-Grid projects started in September 2005 with the goal of developing a distributed, integrated resource platform for high-performance computing and related services to enable the processing of large amounts of scientific data and information. MediGrid is one of the so-called Community Grids which were developed for different research disciplines.
Main goals of the project: The main goal of the MediGrid project was to develop a Grid infrastructure and test it through several test applications. The main motivation was to develop a technical platform in which then different applications could be integrated with comparatively little effort.
Project maturity: At the end of the project period, the infrastructure has been established successfully and the first test applications have been run. The original project aim has therefore been achieved. However, during the lifetime of the project the main funding agency, the BMBF has been raising issues of sustainability. This objective could not be achieved, since the Grid infrastructure and the services based on it are in a very early stage of the market cycle. They lack yet the maturity to become financially sustainable.
Nevertheless, several spin-off projects from MediGrid have been designed – some already funded, some awaiting funding – that are hoped to advance the services provided based on the Grid infrastructure to marketability.
Project funding: MediGrid project received around 5 million Euro from the BMBF. An estimated 80% of this funding is needed for personnel and the remainder (around 20%) are special investments funds for infrastructure costs.
Organizational Structure
Size and composition: There are eight partners to the MediGrid project, all of them are German public or semi-public institutions.
Governance The project coordinator is TMF (Telematikplattform für medizinische Forschungsnetze). The TMF office has been responsible for the organization of so-called
„speaker-meetings“, and for the exchange of documents between the project partners. The project is organized in 8 different modules (coordination, resource fusion, ontology tools, middleware, image processing, biomedical informatics, clinical research, e-Science).
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Managing internal and external relations
Management of the project: The module leaders plus the consortium spokesman constitute the “speakers board” that meets quarterly to take decisions concerning the MediGrid project.
The decisions concern mostly implementations issues. Since all project partners have submitted and been granted individual project proposals, they all have their specific project aims and implementation infrastructure. The “speakers board” then is responsible for the overall cooperation and presentation of the results
Since each project partners is fully responsible for their particular project, the motivation for cooperation has to be mostly intrinsic since there are no formal provisions to ensure
cooperation and the decision of the “speakers board” are not fully binding. Consequently, the participation of the partners has been variably distributed due to different degrees of intrinsic motivation. As in many other projects with several project partners involved, the efforts undertaken by the partners depended very much on the persons representing the partner organizations.
Users: The aim of the project was to provide a testbed for services and rather than to provide fully-fledged services during the project time. Consequently, there have been rather low numbers of users that cannot be pinned down to any concrete number. Especially, there are no users completely external to the project. The subproject “Augustus”, dealing with a genetic sequence analysis, had a slightly bigger (potential) user community since the tool existed and had been in use before, and the project only advanced it through the use of Grid technology. All in all, more users are expected for the spin-off projects being implemented after the end of the MediGrid project.
User recruitment: N/A, no external users have been recruited.
Drivers and barriers to adoption: N/A, no external users have been recruited.
Challenges in interdisciplinary collaboration: The project staff includes around 40% computer scientists and other engineers, 40% computational biologists, and additional each 10% of purely medical staff, and economists and other. All take on different functions according to their field of expertise. Difficulties concerning the cooperation resulted not primarily from the interdisciplinary compositions of the project teams, but stemmed mostly from the cooperation between different partner organizations. Since no enforcing measures existed, some partners were more active than others. All in all, the communication is estimated to have worked well, for some applications better than for others
Collaboration with other organizations: N/A
Technology
Main technologies, resources and services: overview of available resources, technologies and services: Software: MediGrid has not been devised as a Data Grid but as a Computing Grid.
For this purpose, the project team has tried to use and adapt existing open source software, such as Globus and Unicore. A more complex middleware used was “Workflow Manager”, and
“Gwess”, an in-house development of Fraunhofer Institute that was further developed and adapted for project purposes.
The website portal has been devised as the unique entry point for all applications and has actually been successfully used by all MediGrid applications. The software used was the Open Source “Gridsphere” by Windows. OGSA-DEI has been used as the main software for data integration, the standard for image data was Dicom. During the course of the MediGrid project this standard has been updated with additional security features and developed to a new standard “Grid Dicom”.
Page 71 Data/storage: The “Biomed” application of MediGrid has used internet-based genetic
databases, while the image data used for other applications has been data accumulated for and by the project partners. All data used in MediGrid has been stored locally, which means that it has been stored at the sites of the computing centres. However the local data storage did not mean that all project partners were allowed to access the data.
Role of technology development: See above for Gwess.
Data sharing: See above.
Interoperability with similar or connecting infrastructures: N/A
Contribution
Main contributions of project: The main contribution of the project is the software developed that can be used for future projects. One of the technical contributions of MediGrid was the development of the enhanced “Grid Dicom” image data standard.
The experience gained as to how such a cooperation based on Grid technology can work, can also be seen as a major outcome of the project that should be useful for future co-operations, especially with a view to policy mechanisms and regulations.
Concerning the geographical scope of the project, one of the benefits of the project was the dissemination about the MediGrid activities on a global level. Especially the awareness level in the United States has been raised. This enhanced knowledge about the project has been achieved mainly through the membership of TMF in the healthgrid.org (Europe) and through a comparatively close and successful cooperation with caBIG, a big health Grid program based in the United States. In addition, TMF has initiated a “Forum Grid”, as an exchange platform for all actors involved or interested in health grids. The MediGrid project has contributed significantly to this higher level of interconnectivity and networking that can be perceived today.
Challenges: A principal challenge seems to be the project structure that results from funding requirements. Since each partner is only responsible for a specific subproject, it becomes difficult to motivate the partners to cooperate in view of the overall project objectives and requirements.
Informants’ recommendations to policy makers
Our informant recommends that cost structures of public research institutions in Germany become more transparent, so as to facilitate the budgeting and billing of services between project partners. This higher transparency is seen as an absolute necessity in order to envisage and achieve financial sustainability of similar research projects. The lack of transparency concerns, in particular, indirect costs, but staff costs are also not always calculated realistically.
In addition, the legal regulations concerning the use of patient data should be revised. Up to now it is near to impossible to transfer or share non-anonymous patient data via a network or Grid due to legal uncertainties. The data transfer is possible inside one institution or between two institutions, but difficult when more actors are involved. The biggest problem in this case is the need for the patients’ consent when his/her data is transferred to a different place.
Even if the data concerned is made anonymous, the federal government’s ethics board has to be consulted first.
Another difficulty is related to funding: in Germany in the IT sector data processing systems (hardware) are financed comparatively often and easily. However, the operating costs and overhead expenditures are financed far less often. This selective funding encourages organizations to buy their own hardware instead of using shared resources that they cannot
Page 72 bill on project budgets or receive funding for. This means that at the time being “normal”
projects cannot receive funding for the use of Grid Infrastructure.
Another problem encountered by MediGrid were differing legal environments – in Germany due to the federal structure, the exchange of computing capacity between federal states proved difficult. On an international level, differing legislation concerning data protection might also hamper (medical) Grid projects.
SWOT analysis
Table 4-24: MediGrid strengths and weaknesses
Strengths Weakness
Long-term funding
Not secured, rather follow up projects Sustainability Knowledge spills over to follow-up
projects
No user base beyond the project
User recruitment Ditto
Involvement of current users Organizational bedding
Project well anchored in participating organisations
Little integration between partners Institutionalised
links
Good links to international Grid projects External use of
software, tools
Use in follow up projects
Table 4-25: MediGrid opportunities and threats
Opportunities Threats
Funding of member organizations
N/A since project has ended N/A since project has ended
Technology monitoring
N/A since project has ended N/A since project has ended Competition with
other
infrastructures or technologies
N/A since project has ended N/A since project has ended
Security risks None disclosed None disclosed
Change of user communities and fields
N/A since project has ended N/A since project has ended
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