Overview of Public Health Grid (PHGrid) Activities and Projects – the CDC Perspective

Over the past two years, CDC and its partners have been involved in research in the domain of grid computing, a paradigm that proposes aggregating geographically distributed, heterogeneous computing, storage and network resources to provide unified, secure and pervasive access to their combined capabilities (Foster and Kesselman, 1999). Grid technology provides a secure software infrastructure for federating databases and services utilizing a service-oriented architecture (SOA). It has been the hope that through this research, innovative solutions can be found to solve significant information exchange challenges within the domain of public health. This presentation will provide an overview of the wide variety of activities coordinated by the NCPHI Grid Team. Specific topics to be briefly discussed will include: • The customization and use of a PHGrid Blog and Wiki, as well as the set of open source tools used. This will include the demonstration of an application/service registry. • The activities around the customization of grid middleware- based on the Globus® Toolkit (PHGrid “Publisher”). • Examining the capability of a grid-based infrastructure to distribute a SAS program to data holders and to send aggregated results to an authorized user. • Efforts around facilitating rapid deployment of globus-based grid nodes • The creation of a secure web service for visualization of poison center data for nationwide biosurveillance • The examination of interoperability between the NHIN gateway and a PHGrid node infrastructure • The development of user interfaces to PHGrid services. • The development of a situational service based on the concept of population-level aggregate counts (i.e., an aggregate minimum data set / population data object) Through our efforts, collaboration has been crucial in developing requirements and resolving issues. Future directions will include examining novel domain services (bioinformatics), enhanced services (e.g., computational), as well as more complex grid-based technologies (e.g., grid-based intelligent agents).