GeneGrid

GeneGrid is a research project being jointly developed by Fusion Antibodies Ltd, Amtec Medical Ltdand the Belfast e-Science Centre (BESC) with funding from the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry)in the United Kingdom. This project will combine the skills and experience of the stakeholders andthe collaborative sharing and coordinated use of their distributed resources to create a "virtualBioinformatics laboratory" using the Grid. This will allow all relevant organizations, partners &customers to access their collective skills, experience and results in a secure, reliable and scalablemanner.

View the project website for more information.

Biomedical Informatics Research Network

The BIRN porject is a shared biomedical IT infrastructure to hasten the derivation of new understanding and treatment of disease through the use of distributed knowledge. Drawing upon the expertise and technologies available at numerous institutions, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) is building an infrastructure of networked high-performance computers, data integration standards, and other emerging technologies, to pave the way for medical researchers to transform the treatment of disease.
Launched in 2001 as an initiative of the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources, the BIRN is prototyping a collaborative environment for biomedical research and clinical information management.

• A central component of the BIRN is its Coordinating Center, overseeing the networking, distributed storage, and software development needs of the three neuroimaging test beds:


• The Function BIRN Test Bed is employing functional neuroimaging to explore the underlying causes of schizophrenia and to subsequently assess the impact of new treatments on functional brain abnormalities.


• The Brain Morphometry Test Bed is focused on pooling acquired data across neuroimaging sites to investigate if specific anatomical differences are diagnostic of specific memory dysfunctions, such as depression, mild Alzheimer's disease, and mild cognitive impairment.


• Collaborators in the Mouse BIRN Test Bed are utilizing multi-modal and multi-scale imaging data from mouse models of neurological disorders to better understand schizophrenia, Parkinson disease, multiple sclerosis, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and brain cancer.

While the pioneering data sites involve dedicatedhardware, the system is rapidly evolving to includedata repositories associated with any laboratoryresearch program. Access to these distributed datais available from web interfaces and through high orlow bandwidth network connections.

The BIRN portal provides a scientific gateway for researchers to collaborate on the projects and experiements described above as well as create new ones. A major aspect of the portal is to provide data access to the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) as well as make security easier for end users by relying on the Grid Account Management Architecture (GAMA)