Code-A-Thon

I attended the NHIN CONNECT Code-A-Thon in Portland, Oregon last week. It was two days of developers planning out and working on the next release of the NHIN CONNECT software (v2.3). There's a wiki up with notes from the two days worth of sessions.

But the interesting, relevant piece was when they started talking about future architecture. Two of the future topics (out of probably 20 or so) were grid computing and cloud computing. Because of the distributed nature of NHIN (CONNECT nodes everywhere), we had a short discussion about how data and computing power can be spread around in a distributed manner. Specifically, the question of hadoop and map-reduce was brought up about how jobs can be spread out over NHIN and NHIN-compatible systems.

On the whole, a pretty remarkable mini-con. This is a new approach to Federal open source projects and refreshing that OSS has come so far.

Vietnam welcomes three new grid sites; hospitals get new ‘HOPE’

.... HOPE (HOspital Platform for E-health) developed jointly at CNRS and HealthGrid in France, allows hospital sites to exchange medical information. HOPE is now installed at the Institute of Information Technology in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, for testing. All going well, it will be installed in the primary Ho Chi Minh hospital.... read more..
http://www.isgtw.org/?pid=1002120