Summary
Background: The availability of large amounts of data in heterogeneous formats and the rapid
progress in fields such as computer based drug design, medical imaging and medical
simulations have lead to a growing demand for large computational power and easy accessibility
to heterogeneous data sources. Objectives: The goal is to address these needs by deploying computing grids. Grids provide both
large scale and distributed storage facilities and an increased computing power. Moreover,
Grids are a promising tool to foster the synergy between bioinformatics and computerised
medical imaging.
Methods: A first biomedical grid is being deployed within the framework of the DataGrid IST
project (www.edg.org). The goal of the project is to provide a novel environment to support globally distributed
scientific exploration involving up to multi-Perabyte datasets.
Results and Conclusions: The first biomedical applications deployed inside the project demonstrate the relevance
of the grid paradigm for genomics and medical image processing. They also highlight
the specific requirements of the biomedical community.
Keywords
Genomics - medical image processing - computing grid
