HealthGrid 2011, Bristol, UK
EGI, Life Sciences and the HealthGrid Comference 2011
The 2011 HealthGrid Conference in Bristol got off to a flying start with an upbeat summary of the current situation for eScience research and associated facilities in Melbourne and the rest of Australia from Professor Richard Sinnott recently of these islands. Richard has an admirable track record having delivered a strong legacy of clinical research-related projects based around robust and well-crafted solutions. However, the risks associated with such solutions hinge largely on the sustainability of such interventions in the longer term. This is where EGI comes in, building on the achievements of such projects by transferring the applications and services to a production infrastructure when and where applicable in the European context. In this way EGI can provide a way forward from the dependency on the project cycle for developing research infrastructure leaving experts like Richard free to take on new challenges whether in Australia or Europe.
The ScalaLife project has been established to develop scalable software services for Life Sciences. This project sits perfectly between the recently formalised Life Sciences Grid Community (LSGC) EGI Virtual Research Community and EGI itself. In addition to the EGI Applications Database (AppDB) which can be used to promote the outputs of ScalaLife, EGI can also contribute to the project with an emerging collection of requirements which have been collected so far from Life Sciences. We look forward to collaborating with the ScalaLife developers in the near future.
It is worth mentioning Vincent Breton’s Jean-Claude Healy Lecture which presented a compelling overview of the story so far in terms of Distributed Computing Infrastructure from a French perspective. This covered Cloud Computing, the EGI/NGI model, Life Sciences, application development and users. I also liked the reference to the importance of the grid of users over the underlying technology. The talk was permeated by an infectious, upbeat tone on the opportunities that present themselves during the steps ahead.
Finally, the day ends with a philosopher’s perspective on Cloud Computing and its Ethical Challenges from Professor Luciano Floridi from Herts/Oxford. But that’s another blog post for another day.
