Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 6 of 6
-
ItemDeployment of grids through integrated configuration management(ACTA Press, 2008)A Grid environment typically comes into existence when several collaborating institutions contribute resources for researchers to solve problems of mutual interest. Such collaboration of personnel and resources are commonly referred to as a Virtual Organization (VO). The process to establish and manage a VO can be a time consuming and laborious process with installation and configuration of VO specific software and data needed across sites. Configuration management technologies can facilitate this process, however to support the establishment of Grid based VOs, it is necessary to align and integrate Grids and configuration management technologies. This alignment should recognize that sites may have their own flavors of configuration management tools and Grid technologies, and allow VO administrators to seamlessly deploy and configure Grid resources across multiple sites. This paper presents the experiences in developing and testing such an integrated Grid and configuration management framework.
-
ItemTowards a Virtual Anonymisation Grid for Unified Access to Remote Clinical Data(IOS PRESS, 2008)Grid technologies provide an infrastructure through which, amongst other things, data access and integration is facilitated across highly distributed and heterogeneous resources. Different domains have their own requirements on the nature of this data access and integration. The clinical domain offers arguably the greatest challenges facing the roll-out and adoption of Grid technologies to meet the changing face of post-genomic clinical research, especially with regard to information governance, ethics and hence security solutions. This paper outlines a novel system design for secure anonymous data access and linkage that meets the needs of key stakeholders in this space including end user researchers, data providers and owners and ethical oversight bodies amongst others. We identify how existing solutions developed within the Medical Research Council funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project are being re-factored to meet the needs of these players and to address information governance criteria.
-
ItemAdvanced security for virtual organizations: the pros and cons of centralized vs decentralized security models(IEEE Computer Society, 2008)Grids allow for collaborative e-Research to be undertaken, often across institutional and national boundaries. Typically this is through the establishment and management of virtual organizations (VOs) where policies on access and usage of resources across partner sites are defined and subsequently enforced. For many existing VOs, these agreements have been lightweight and erred on the side of flexibility with minimal constraints on the kinds of jobs a user is allowed to run or the amount of resources that can be consumed. For many new domains such as e-Health, such flexibility is simply not tenable. Instead, precise definitions of what jobs can be run, and what data can be accessed by who need to be defined and enforced by sites. The role based access control model (RBAC) provides a well researched paradigm for controlling access to large scale dynamic VOs. However, the standard RBAC model does not specify how roles should be defined and made known to local resource sites (who are always deemed to be autonomous to make access control decisions). Two main possibilities exist based on either a centralized or decentralized approach to VO role management. We present the advantages and disadvantages of the centralized and decentralized role models and describe how we have implemented them in a range of security focused e-Research domains at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow.
-
ItemData privacy by design: digital infrastructures for clinical collaborations(International Society for Research in Science and Technology, 2009)The clinical sciences have arguably the most stringent security demands on the adoption and roll-out of collaborative e-Infrastructure solutions such as those based upon Grid-based middleware. Experiences from the Medical Research Council (MRC) funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project and numerous other real world security driven projects at the UK e-Science National e-Science Centre (NeSC – www.nesc.ac.uk) have shown that whilst advanced Grid security and middleware solutions now offer capabilities to address many of the distributed data and security challenges in the clinical domain, the real clinical world as typified by organizations such as the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK are extremely wary of adoption of such technologies: firewalls; ethics; information governance, software validation, and the actual realities of existing infrastructures need to be considered from the outset. Based on these experiences we present a novel data linkage and anonymisation infrastructure that has been developed with close co-operation of the various stakeholders in the clinical domain (including the NHS) that addresses their concerns and satisfies the needs of the academic clinical research community. We demonstrate the implementation of this infrastructure through a representative clinical study on chronic diseases in Scotland.
-
Item
-
ItemSupporting security-oriented, collaborative nanoCMOS electronics research(SPRINGER-VERLAG BERLIN, 2008)