A service-oriented grid infrastructure for biomedical data and compute services

Service-oriented Grid technologies are increasingly utilized for the realization of future biomedical IT infrastructures since they offer unprecedented opportunities for the integration of advanced analysis and simulation applications as well as distributed heterogeneous data sources and information systems. The European Union's @neurIST project is developing a Grid-based IT infrastructure for the management of all processes linked to research, diagnosis, and treatment development for complex and multifactorial diseases encompassing data repositories, computational analysis services, and information systems handling multiscale, multimodal information at distributed sites. This paper provides an overview of the @neurIST Grid middleware and outlines the infrastructure offered for the provision of advanced compute and data services to support computationally demanding modeling and simulation tasks and to access heterogeneous distributed data sources through semantic integration.