caGrid 1.4 Production Grid

Overview

The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, or caBIG is an initiative of the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.

caBIG is a voluntary virtual informatics infrastructure that connects data, research tools, scientists, and organizations to leverage their combined strengths and expertise in an open federated environment with widely accepted standards and shared tools. The underlying service oriented infrastructure that supports caBIG is referred to as caGrid. Driven primarily by scientific use cases from the cancer research community, caGrid provides the core enabling infrastructure necessary to compose the Grid of caBIG. It provides the technology that enables collaborating institutions to share information and analytical resources efficiently and securely, while also allowing investigators to easily contribute to and leverage the resources of a national-scale, multi-institutional environment.

Request Grid Account

Request caBIG Account Using GAARDS UI

Request Account Using the caBIG caGrid Portal

Service Addresses

Each caGridservice registers itself to a central Index Service, eliminating the need to hardcode addresses. The Discovery Client enables programmatic discovery of services, only the Index Service's well known address is needed. However, in some cases it may be useful to know the address of core services.

The caGrid core infrastructure services, maintained by the NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Techhnology, are:

• Metadata Services
  • Global Model Exchange
    https://cagrid-gme.nci.nih.gov:8443/wsrf/services/cagrid/GlobalModelExchange
  • Metadata Model Service
    http://cagrid-mms.nci.nih.gov:8080/wsrf/services/cagrid/MetadataModelService
  • Index Service
    http://cagrid-index.nci.nih.gov:8080/wsrf/services/DefaultIndexService
• Security Services
  • Authentication Service
    https://cagrid-auth.nci.nih.gov:8443/wsrf/services/cagrid/AuthenticationService
    • This Authentication service interfaces with the NCI's E-directory to allow NCI employees to login to the Grid.
  • Credential Delegation Service
    https://cagrid-cds.nci.nih.gov:8443/wsrf/services/cagrid/CredentialDelegationService
  • Dorian
    https://cagrid-dorian.nci.nih.gov:8443/wsrf/services/cagrid/Dorian
  • Grid Grouper
    https://cagrid-gridgrouper.nci.nih.gov:8443/wsrf/services/cagrid/GridGrouper
  • GTS (master)
    https://cagrid-gts-master.nci.nih.gov:8443/wsrf/services/cagrid/GTS
  • GTS (slave)
    https://cagrid-gts-slave.nci.nih.gov:8443/wsrf/services/cagrid/GTS
• Business Activity Services
  • FederatedQueryProcessor
    https://cagrid-fqp.nci.nih.gov:8443/wsrf/services/cagrid/FederatedQueryProcessor
  • BPEL Workflow Service
    https://cagrid-bpel-wf.nci.nih.gov:8443/wsrf/services/cagrid/WorkflowFactoryService
  • Taverna Workflow Service
    https://cagrid-taverna-wf.nci.nih.gov:8443/wsrf/services/cagrid/TavernaWorkflowService
• Web Applications
  • caGrid Portal
    http://cagrid-portal.nci.nih.gov/

Production Grid Hardware

Services for the NCI Production Grid are hosted on multiple servers:
Physical Machines

OS	CPU	RAM	Disk	Services
RHEL4	2 x Intel 3.8 GHz	12 GB	2 x 146 GB, 2 x 72 GB	Dorian, syncGTS
RHEL4	2 x Intel 3.8 GHz	12 GB	2 x 146 GB, 2 x 72 GB	Authentication Service, CDS, syncGTS
RHEL4	4 x AMD 2.8 GHz Dual Core	64 GB		VMWare ESX 3.02 Host #1
RHEL4	4 x AMD 2.8 GHz Dual Core	64 GB		VMWare ESX 3.02 Host #2
RHEL4	4 x AMD 2.8 GHz Dual Core	64 GB		VMWare ESX 3.02 Host #3

Virtual Machines: hosted on a 3-way ESX cluster (VMHost #1-3 above)

A note about virtual machines: Several services require synchronization system clocks (due to time-based operations, such as the Index Service, or time-based certificate constraints, such as Dorian or the Authentication Service). In some deployments of Virtual Machines, time drift has been observed under a moderate load. For this reason, Dorian and Authentication Service were not hosted on virtual machines in the production environment, though we have successfully deployed them on Virtual Machines in other deployments.