caGrid 1.3 New Features

Deprecation Notes

Every release of caGrid features notes on the Deprecated Services and APIs.

Key Enhancements

The caGrid 1.3 release further expands the infrastructure and tooling to support use cases from the scientific community. It is backwards compatible with 1.x versions of caGrid, and includes many exciting new features and enhancements. A detailed listing of the changes from caGrid 1.2 can be found in the release notes, but highlights include:

Continuous Integration

caGrid 1.3 enhances support for the latest releases (version 4.1.1) of the caCORE Software Development Kit (SDK) and Common Security Module (CSM). caGrid and the caCORE SDK now share a common code base for CQL. In addition, caGrid 1.3 supports the most recent web services containers in the NCI CBIIT Technology Stack (Tomcat 5.5 and JBoss 4.0.5).

Data Services

Significant enhancements to the Federated Query Processor (FQP), allowing a single query to execute against multiple caGrid data services and return a unified result set. FQP now supports WS-Notification, allowing clients to subscribe to their results resource and be notified when data is available rather than repeatedly polling the service. Querying secure grid data services is now possible via the caGrid Credential Delegation Service (CDS). Configurable query execution parameters allow clients to specify error handling conditions and allow partial result sets to be returned. Large data sets can now be handled via WS-Enumeration and the out-of-band caGrid Transfer Service.

Introduce Toolkit

The Introduce Toolkit has a number of security-related enhancements, adding fine-grain control over authorization using the caCORE Common Security Module (CSM) and Grid Grouper. Introduce also includes service updaters, allowing service developers to easily update-to and leverage caGrid 1.3.

Metadata Services

The Mobius Global Model Exchange (GME) has been entirely rewritten for caGrid 1.3 to support the Semantic requirements of caBIG® software developers. The caGrid-developed caDSR grid service, based on the caCORE 3.1 API, has been deprecated, It has been replaced by the caDSR 4.0 data service (maintained by the caDSR team), and a new caGrid Metadata Model Service (MMS), whose purpose is creation and semantic annotation of caGrid metadata models using caDSR-derived data.

Security

Enhancements to the GAARDS infrastructure include support for multiple authentication profiles, including one-time passwords. Trusted Identity Providers can now be discovered programmatically, allowing full realization of federated authentication use cases. Auditing support has also been added to Dorian, giving systems administrators the degree of control they have requested.

Taverna Workflow

Orchestration of caGrid services is supported in this release though joint development with the Taverna project. The caGrid plug-in for the Taverna 2.0 workbench allows development of workflows using their rich user interface.