Prototype development
The software infrastructure is being developed in close collaboration with the modellers in the project through an iterative process. This involves prototyping the capabilities needed to run a representative set of heart and cancer modelling applications then demonstrating these to evaluate progress and guide future development.
This process is based round a set of trial applications which are serving several purposes:
- they have engaged the research scientists at an early stage in the project to clarify their real requirements and are maintaining their involvement;
- they are enabling us to validate the developing project architecture and obtain rapid feedback from users to the software team on the effectiveness of the new services; and
- they provide a context for assessing and deploying new developments in Grid technology as these emerge.
The project makes two software releases per year. These will make gradually expanding subsets of the planned project software infrastructure available to our scientific users. They will build on top of Grid middleware as it is made available from OMII and other sources and the maturing national infrastructure such as the National Grid Service . They will also help to drive improved accessibility via the Grid to major national facilities such as HPC-x , CSAR and UKLight.