MediGRID - grid computing for medicine and life sciences

MediGRID has established a grid infrastructure for medical and bioinformatical research. It enhances interdisciplinary and widely location-independent collaboration of researchers by providing grid services in a controlled e-Science platform which is continually available, economically calculable and secure. As part of the German e-Science initiative D-Grid MediGRID provides access to the available D-Grid resources by the MediGRID portal. This gives an easy, secure and transparent access to a broad spectrum of applications for bioinformatics, medical image processing and clinical research. The application uses the MediGRID middleware which realizes a service oriented architecture. Service for the management of data, workflows, and resources and for enhanced security are provided. The advantages of using grid computing for medical and life sciences applications are the reduction of processing times, world-wide usage for a broad community of users and access to distributed information sources of academic and clinic providers.