Ravi Madduri and Stuart Martin of Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division and Wei Tan of the University of Chicago/Argonne Computation Institute were honored recently for their work in the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG).
Madduri and Tan were presented with the caBIG Teamwork Award for their contributions to the Workflow Working Group. Madduri and Martin received a caBIG Teamwork Award in recognition of their efforts as members of the caGrid-TeraGrid Integration Team.
The caBIG initiative is a four-year project, funded by the National Cancer Institute, with the mission of linking the more than 60 cancer centers across the U.S. into an integrated distributed-computing system.
Under the leadership of Madduri, the Argonne software developers have designed and implemented several innovative technologies in the caBIG architecture and have developed a collaborative information network to enable interoperability among biomedial databases and analytical tools.
The new infrastructure, called caGrid, uses the Argonne-developed Globus toolkit for creating, registering, discovering, and invoking analytical routines as Grid services. Authorized researchers nationwide can invoke these services and compose multiple services into workflows for individual applications. The infrastructure also provides a common gateway service between the caGrid and the TeraGrid, which integrates high-performance computers, data storage, and high-end experimental facilities around the country. This new gateway service, bridges caGrid authentication and authorization processes to the TeraGrid security services, so users can easily access the resources of the TeraGrid without having to modify their applications.
The two awards -- presented at the annual caBIG meeting in Washington, D.C. in June -- commend the team efforts of the software developers in this highly collaborative project. Indeed, this is the second year the group led by Madduri received such an award. Argonne’s contributions to the caBIG initiative are helping to bring together biomedical researchers and to accelerate discovery of new approaches for the detection, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of cancer.