DRN Demonstration

Someone just remembered for me that I never summarized the results of our Harvard Distributed Research Network research project.

Ken will ultimately write up the findings, but until then, I thought I'd make a few comments.

We presented to the DRN/DEcIDE group on February 19th at 230pm. The group included: DEcIDE centers at the HMO Research Network Center for Education and Research on Therapeutics and the University of Pennsylvania and the participating health plans: Geisinger Health System, Group Health Cooperative, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, HealthPartners, Kaiser Permanente Colorado, and Kaiser Permanente Northern California

I've uploaded the presentation to the wiki.

The short story is that we demonstrated secure transfer of SAS programs over the PHGrid nodes using the PHGrid SSTS service, remote execution of the program at clinical partners (on synthetic data) and then combining the aggregate results together in the NCPHI lab using open source spreadsheet software (StarOffice).

DRN Demo preparation

Dan and I tested the manual steps for the DRN demo with Joel Spangler from Geisinger. We transferred up the user SAS program using Ross' naming conventions, Joel combined the user SAS program with the Geisinger template, Joel ran the SAS program, I copied down the output file and displayed it using Open Office's spreadsheet program. Then Dan and I ran through the same steps using the NCPHI node.

I also wrote a few simple bash shell scripts that will help the demo go faster when we're running within WebEx. These bash scripts will be replaced by Don Brown's perl scripts once they are ready.

Curiously, the SSTS client runs a lot more slowly from Linux nodes than from Dan's windows client setup. It's a significant time difference (60 seconds on Linux vs. 5 seconds on Windows) and we'll be investigating to determine what the difference is.

DRN upcoming presentations

DRN upcoming presentations as follows:

Demonstrate to DRN group ("internal presentation"): Thurs., 2/5 @ 4:30PM ET

Demonstrate to large group ("external presentation"): Thurs., 2/19 @ 2:30PM ET

WebEx Demo

Updated DRN Design drafts

I updated the DRN Design Drafts wiki page with a data flow diagram to show the flow of detailed data --> aggregate data --> combined aggregate data based on some feedback from Roy Pardee, Ross Lazarus and Jeff Brown.

DRN Design drafts

I've put together some design sketches to show the planned deployment and sequence of events for the DRN SAS automation scripts that Dan has begun writing.

http://sites.google.com/site/phgrid/Distributed-Research-Network/drn-sas-grid-design

Basically we'll have three components:

1. ClientScript.pl - transfers files to Globus nodes and aggregates the output documents into a single TSV report (to be developed)


2. Secure Simple Transfer Service - runs on the Globus nodes and allows for listing, getting and putting of sas programs and output files (already completed)


3. SASProcessorScript.pl - configures and runs sas programs against databases (to be developed)

Please let me know any comments you may have as Dan is beginning to develop the scripts. The source code will be stored in http://phgrid.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/phgrid/drn/

(here's the visio file should anyone want to make direct comments and changes.)