Data Management Services for VPH Applications

<!--HTML-->The VPH-Share project [1] develops a cloud platform for the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) research community. One of the key challenges is to share and access large datasets used by medical applications to transform them into meaningful diagnostic information. VHP researchers need advanced storage capabilities to enable collaboration without introducing additional complexity to the way data are accessed and shared. In the VPH-Share cloud platform [2], the data storage federation [3] is achieved by an aggregation of data resources in a client-centric manner and exposing it via a standardized protocol that can be also mounted and presented as a local storage so a kind of a file system abstraction is provided. There is a common management layer that uses loosely coupled and independent storage resources and with such a layer a variety of storage resources such as simple file servers, storage clouds and data grid may be aggregated exposing all available storage. As a result, distributed applications have a global shared view of the whole available storage space. This feature makes the development, deployment and debugging of applications considerably easier. The platform is also equipped with mechanisms for validating data reliability and integrity in a heterogeneous distributed cloud environments. The VPH-share clould platform has become a full-fledged environment in which VPH data and applications are deployed and shared. The system is protected by an integrated security solution which uses BiomedTown [4] as its OpenID Identity Provider. Applications which have already been deployed within the VPH-Share platform include a.o. the ViroLab Comparative Drug Ranking System, the @neurIST morphological workflow, and the OncoSimulator tool [5]. Acknowledgment: This work was supported by the EU FP7 project VPH-Share (269978). References 1. VPH-Share project website: http://www.vph-share.eu/ 2. Nowakowski P, Bartynski T, Gubala T, Harezlak D, Kasztelnik M, Malawski M, Meizner J, Bubak M: Cloud Platform for Medical Applications, eScience 2012 3. Spiros Koulouzis, Dmitry Vasyunin, Reginald Cushing, Adam Belloum, Marian Bubak: Cloud Data Federation for Scientific Applications. Euro-Par Workshops 2013: 13-22 4. BioMedTown Biological Research Community: https://www.biomedtown.org/ 5. Atmosphere platform: http://dice.cyfronet.pl/products/atmosphere