End-to-End QoS Support for a Medical Grid Service Infrastructure

Quality of Service support is an important prerequisite for the adoption of Grid technologies for medical applications. The GEMSS Grid infrastructure addressed this issue by offering end-to-end QoS in the form of explicit timeliness guarantees for compute-intensive medical simulation services. Within GEMSS, parallel applications installed on clusters or other HPC hardware may be exposed as QoS-aware Grid services for which clients may dynamically negotiate QoS constraints with respect to response time and price using Service Level Agreements. The GEMSS infrastructure and middleware is based on standard Web services technology and relies on a reservation based approach to QoS coupled with application specific performance models. In this paper we present an overview of the GEMSS infrastructure, describe the available QoS and security mechanisms, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods with a Grid-enabled medical imaging service

Grid simulation services for the medical community

The first part of this paper presents a selection of medical simulation applications, including image reconstruction, near real-time registration for neuro-surgery, enhanced dose distribution calculation for radio-therapy, inhaled drug delivery prediction, plastic surgery planning and cardio-vascular system simulation. The latter two topics are discussed in some detail. In the second part, we show how such services can be made available to the clinical practitioner using Grid technology. We discuss the developments and experience made during the EU project GEMSS, which provides reliable, efficient, secure and lawful medical Grid services

GEMSS: Grid-infrastructure for Medical Service Provision

Objectives: The European GEMSS Project is concerned with the creation of medical Grid service prototypes and their evaluation in a secure service-oriented infrastructure for distributed on demand/supercomputing. Key aspects of the GEMSS Grid middleware include negotiable QoS support for time-critical service provision, flexible support for business models, and security at all levels in order to ensure privacy of patient data as well as compliance to EU law

Quality of Service Negotiation for Commercial Medical Grid Services

The GEMSS project has developed a service-oriented Grid that supports the provision of medical simulation services by service providers to clients such as hospitals. We outline the GEMSS architecture, legal framework and the security features that characterise the GEMSS infrastructure. High levels of quality of service are required and we describe a reservation-based approach to quality of service, employing a quality of service management system that iteratively finds suitable reservations and uses application specific performance models. The GEMSS Grid is a commercial environment so we support flexible pricing models and a FIPA reverse English auction protocol. Signed Web Service Level Agreement contracts are exchanged to commit parties to a quality of service agreement before job execution occurs. We run four experiments across European countries using high performance computing resources running advanced resource reservation schedulers. These experiments provide evidence for our Grid’s rational behaviour, both at the level of service provider quality of service management and at the higher level of the client choosing between competing service providers. The results lend support to our economic model and the technology we use for our medical application domain

Numerical Simulation for eHealth: Grid-enabled Medical Simulation Services

The European GEMSS Project is concerned with the creation of medical Grid service prototypes and their evaluation in a secure service oriented infrastructure for distributed on demand supercomputing the GEMSS testbed. The medical prototype applications include maxillofacial surgery simulation, neurosurgery support, radiosurgery planning, inhaled drug delivery simulation, cardiovascular simulation and tomographic image reconstruction. GEMSS will enable the widespread use of these computationally demanding tools originating from projects such as BloodSim, SimBio, COPHIT and RAPT as Grid services. The numerical High Performance Computing core includes parallel Finite Element software and Computational Fluid Dynamics simulation as well as parallel optimization methods and parallel Monte Carlo simulation. Targeted enduser groups include biomechanics laboratories, hospital surgery/radiology units, diagnostic and therapeutic departments, designers of medical devices in industry as well as small enterprises involved in consultancy on biomedical simulations. GEMSS addresses security, privacy and legal issues related to the Grid provision of medical simulation and image processing services and the development of suitable business models for sustainable use. The first prototype of the GEMSS middleware is expected to be released in February 2004

SCALEA: A Performance Analysis Tool for Distributed and Parallel Programs

In this paper we present SCALEA, which is a performance instrumentation, measurement, analysis, and visualization tool for parallel and distributed programs that supports post-mortem and online performance analysis. SCALEA currently focuses on performance analysis for OpenMP, MPI, HPF, and mixed parallel/distributed programs

Journal of Grid Computing Editors: P. Kacsuk Journal no. 10723 Quality of service negotiation for commercial medical Grid services

Abstract: The GEMSS project has developed a service-oriented Grid that supports the provision of medical simulation services by service providers to clients such as hospitals. We outline the GEMSS architecture, legal framework and the security features that characterise the GEMSS infrastructure. High levels of quality of service are required and we describe a reservation-based approach to quality of service, employing a quality of service management system that iteratively finds suitable reservations and uses application specific performance models. The GEMSS Grid is a commercial environment so we support flexible pricing models and a FIPA reverse English auction protocol. Signed Web Service Level Agreement contracts are exchanged to commit parties to a quality of service agreement before job execution occurs. We run four experiments across European countries using high performance computing resources running advanced resource reservation schedulers. These experiments provide evidence for our Grid’s rational behaviour, both at the level of service provider quality of service management and at the higher level of the client choosing between competing service providers. The results lend support to our economic model and the technology we use for our medical application domain