GridwiseTech in the ViroLab Project (2006-2009)

The ViroLab project is a joint effort, led by the University of Amsterdam, to create a virtual laboratory for combating HIV and other infectious diseases. Immense medical databases available from various institutions are combined and processed to develop the most promising pharmaceuticals. These may in the future become part of new, revolutionary drugs.

modelling drug interactions

Decades of infectious disease research has created an abundance of clinical data, ready to be used in the search for new cures. However this data is geographically distributed and mostly extremely sensitive. The technical formats of the information vary and there is no unified access method. Therefore sharing between institutions is rare and these databases are not being used to the full extent of their potential.

ViroLab tackled these issues successfully, creating solutions to aggregate all the data; on the one hand allowing participating institutions full control of their resources, and on the other enabling safe sharing and efficient processing. Conducting an experiment with ViroLab is as easy as calling a few people from other institutions, getting online, connecting and clicking “Run”.

GridwiseTech is an active partner of the ViroLab consortium, working together with other established institutions:

University of Stuttgart in Germany
Erasmus MC - University Medical Centre Rotterdam in The Netherlands
Catholic University of Rome in Italy
IRSICAIXA Foundation in Spain
University of Brescia in Italy
Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium
Eotvos Lorand University, ELTE in Hungary
ACK Cyfronet in Poland
University College London, Dep. of Chemistry (UCL) in the United Kingdom

GridwiseTech’s involvement

3D resource manager

GridwiseTech undertook the task of securely integrating distributed sources of data. The nature of the data required complete control over who and how is allowed to access it, with no tolerance for breaches.

GridwiseTech took a federated security approach, based on established Shibboleth technology. Several Home Organizations control their own resources, granting or revoking access to them. These organizations also administer their members participating in the ViroLab system.

To effectively manage access rights, GridwiseTech created a modern Web interface based on Adobe Flex. It offers a very advanced visual overview of the whole system on several levels—databases, applications, organizations, and people—while changes are performed by drag-and-drop of elements and connections between them.

A concept of dynamic Virtual Organizations (VO) was developed, being groups of people spanning across Home Organizations. Any such VO could be a recipient of access rights to resources, allowing quick setup of experiments and achieving rapid results.

Key achievements

Hospitals can now securely aggregate their huge historical databases with others to push medicine beyond its current boundaries.
Each participating institution remains in full control of its data and resources thanks to federated security features.
Virtual Organizations enable rapid collaboration between users, without the delays of engaging administrators or supervisors.
Managing database access is easy and intuitive thanks to a unique 3D drag-and-drop interface.

GridwiseTech offers commercial services based on technologies used and developed in the ViroLab project. We offer:

consulting on Shibboleth
Virtual Organizations in the federated security model
advanced 3D interfaces to manage distributed environments
architecting scalable databases for medicine and healthcare