OBJECTIVE: To develop software infrastructure that will provide support for discovery, characterization, integrated access, and management of diverse and disparate collections of information sources, analysis methods, and applications in biomedical research. DESIGN: An enterprise Grid software infrastructure, called caGrid version 1.0 (caGrid 1.0), has been developed as the core Grid architecture of the NCI-sponsored cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) program. It is designed to support a wide range of use cases in basic, translational, and clinical research, including 1) discovery, 2) integrated and large-scale data analysis, and 3) coordinated study. MEASUREMENTS: The caGrid is built as a Grid software infrastructure and leverages Grid computing technologies and the Web Services Resource Framework standards. It provides a set of core services, toolkits for the development and deployment of new community provided services, and application programming interfaces for building client applications. RESULTS: The caGrid 1.0 was released to the caBIG community in December 2006. It is built on open source components and caGrid source code is publicly and freely available under a liberal open source license. The core software, associated tools, and documentation can be downloaded from the following URL: https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/workspaces/Architecture/caGrid. CONCLUSIONS: While caGrid 1.0 is designed to address use cases in cancer research, the requirements associated with discovery, analysis and integration of large scale data, and coordinated studies are common in other biomedical fields. In this respect, caGrid 1.0 is the realization of a framework that can benefit the entire biomedical community.

MOTIVATION: The complexity of cancer is prompting researchers to find new ways to synthesize information from diverse data sources and to carry out coordinated research efforts that span multiple institutions. There is a need for standard applications, common data models, and software infrastructure to enable more efficient access to and sharing of distributed computational resources in cancer research. To address this need the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has initiated a national-scale effort, called the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIGtrade mark), to develop a federation of interoperable research information systems. RESULTS: At the heart of the caBIG approach to federated interoperability effort is a Grid middleware infrastructure, called caGrid. In this paper we describe the caGrid framework and its current implementation, caGrid version 0.5. caGrid is a model-driven and service-oriented architecture that synthesizes and extends a number of technologies to provide a standardized framework for the advertising, discovery, and invocation of data and analytical resources. We expect caGrid to greatly facilitate the launch and ongoing management of coordinated cancer research studies involving multiple institutions, to provide the ability to manage and securely share information and analytic resources, and to spur a new generation of research applications that empower researchers to take a more integrative, trans-domain approach to data mining and analysis. AVAILABILITY: The caGrid version 0.5 release can be downloaded from https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/workspaces/Architecture/caGrid/. The operational test bed Grid can be accessed through the client included in the release, or through the caGrid-browser web application http://cagrid-browser.nci.nih.gov.