The GEMSS Grid : An Evolving HPC Environment for Medical Applications

Objectives: Grid Enabled Medical Simulation Services (GEMSS) aims to provide a health-computing Grid platform suited to the provision of accessible computeintensive health applications. The viability and performance of the Grid resource is to be tested using a series of six applications, intended to highlight strengths and weaknesses of the Grid infrastructure. Methods: The six applications are diverse and cover surgical planning, medical image processing and reconstruction, bio-fluids simulation and radiosurgery treatment planning. These are being hosted on High Performance Computing facilities in Austria and Germany with middleware built on top of existing Grid and Web technologies. This approach maintains compliance with current standards and ensures future extensibility and interoperability. The GEMSS middleware includes features that support quality of service aspects, business and security. The latter is particularly important within the legal context of European-wide health computing, and secure operation designed to safeguard patient data and confidentiality must be demonstrated. A spectrum of end users has started to evaluate the viability of the Grid from the corporate, health, research and small business sectors and exercise the computing resource in a realistic manner. Results: The applications have been adapted to accommodate the requirements of the Grid infrastructure and demonstrated successful execution. Despite the constraints placed upon compute provision by the health sector, it appears that a secure yet accessible and flexible Grid resource is a viable proposition. Conclusions: GEMSS demonstrates the possibility of much wider access to HPC facilities for users of healthcare applications without compromising security, accessibility and flexibility.