A Human Grid
Initiative

Research & Development

Application Design

Because the Grid is distributed, dynamic, heterogeneous, designing a grid application can represent a challenge.

• The HealthGrid R&D team can help you and provide appropriate support in the various stages of the development of an application:
• Technical features and user requirements analysis which is critical to the success of a grid application;
• Development community input: HealthGrid will make use of its network of people within the community as well as its growing experience in grid projects to obtain an accurate picture of what is expected/needed by the potential users;
• Design and implementation along with testing in a number of current environments;
• Hosting of your collaborative development environment as a virtual space where the application developers– even if separated by time or space – can work together, share and brainstorm on their source code and documentation.

Application Deployment

Once the application has been developped, it needs to be made available to end-users. Various issues have to be addressed for grid deployment or distributed computing, custom operating systems and environments require particular methodologies especially as software needs address concurrency and storage issues.

The HealthGrid R&D team can provide support with the deployment of a given application using various approaches to provide a bigger reach to your application:

• Installing and testing applications on a particular VO through contact and interaction with the appropriate VO managers depending on the scope of the application;
• Virtual machines with multiple OS environments co-existing on the same computer: LiveCDs and liveUSBs containing a bootable computer operating system.

Application Packaging

As an alternative to deployment directly on the Grid or via a virtual machine, there is also the possibility of using installers and packages to distribute your application to both computing scientists and non-experts users. Applications can be packaged in an archive format to be installed by a package management system or a self-contained installer;

The HealthGrid R&D team can help you support and maintain the packaging of ongoing releases of existing applications and their dependencies for various platforms according to the corresponding best practises and system policies: rpm, deb, installers, etc on the various operating systems.

Humanitarian Activities

HealthGrid, as an association is involved in humanitarian projects aiming at developing countries where we can provide support. As such, HealthGrid is involved since 2003 with the association “les eaux vives” on a medical project which has allowed the creation of several health centers and the creation of surgical theaters in several regions of Burkina Faso. The project in Burkina is supporting several dozens of thousands persons who get access to a quality primary health care system at an affordable cost. The work is done in collaboration with the ministry of health and medical doctors and nurses are going all year long in Burkina through the association “les eaux vives” for capacity building purposes of the local medical staff.

HealthGrid also support the communication mechanism between the Health centers and we are now entering a new phase where we want to increase the capacity for epidemiological surveys and mapping, training to scientists and medical staffs, using grid related technologies through the GrACE initiative.

We warmly welcome scientists and HealthGrid communities’ members who would want to contribute to the work we are doing through donations or simply by getting involved in the projects. Do not hesitate to contact us to know more about these humanitarian initiatives.