Report blasts is the problem of Cancer Research Grid

The National Cancer Institute is reassess a broad computing grid used for research on cancer, following an assessment by its Board of scientific advisors that the draft is riddled with problems. NCI has invested more than 350 million dollars in the project, called caBIG, including nearly 200 million dollars over the past two years.

CaBIG, the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, meaning is a pilot project launched in 2004, whose purpose was to provide a computing shared for biomedical research and develop software tools and standard formats for the exchange of information. Funded by the NCI Cancer Centers across the United States, including the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center and Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, have access to caBIG via 145 nodes of the network. CaBIG includes "workspaces, nine" which support research in the life sciences, clinical trials, banks of tissue and pathology and other areas.

Following his appointment in July, Director of NCI Harold Varmus has undertaken a review of four months of caBIG, and this review was completed in February by a group of work of the Council of the Institute of scientific advisers. The Working Group, in a report published last month, showed that less than a dozen cancer centers are using the management of clinical data of the caBIG tools or its cloud computing infrastructure. And while acknowledging that caBIG has had a "positive influence" on the establishment of standards for the exchange of data, the Working Group has criticized program for straying from its objectives initial and sprawling in a too complex "enterprise software" of more than 70 applications.

CaBIG is administered by the NCI of Biomedical Informatics Centre and it. The 10-member working group, composed of experts with degrees in science and medicine, found that management structure for the caBIG program became bureaucratic and suffers from "very high" costs generals. The program has increased too quickly without careful prioritization or a profitable business, according to the working group model. Lead contractors are Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC-Frederick and Sapient.

The NCI Board issued 10 recommendations for corrective action. They include an immediate moratorium on all the caBIG software development, including ongoing projects in commercial contracts. a moratorium of one year on all new projects and contracts; an audit of the expenses of caBIG to date; and the creation of an independent oversight committee.

Report of the Working Group detailed a long list of problems with the program. Some applications caBIG cost millions of dollars for the construction. The price tag for a, caArray, a system of management of the data in table, was $ 9.2 million. Other software is overdesigned, difficult to use, or lack of support and documentation. For these reasons and others, a majority of 32 life science "bench to bench" research tools developed for caBIG had limited use or impact, the report.

Only seven of the 51 centres funded by participating in caBIG NIC cancer uses the program cloud computing infrastructure, caGrid. Twenty others are on route to caGrid, but this brings the total to slightly more than half of these centres. Among the issues cited as obstacles are caGrid is too complex and has not been adequately tested for safety. Even the University of Chicago, which contributed to the development of caGrid, is not its use.

"There is always an example of how not to run a program, it can be," said Michael Biddick, President and CTO of Fusion PPT, a systems integrator working with government agencies. Biddick is a contribution InformationWeek editor who has written on caBIG. "The failure to link the mission objectives to technology shows how important acceptance by users and buy-in can be," he said.

Efforts to build a community of users of caBIG autour, which include strategic planning meetings and monthly conference calls, were also found to be missed. An annual meeting to advance the agenda has been described in the report by a participant not identified as "frenzy of food on the contractor". In addition to three major prime contractors, twenty other providers are involved with caBIG.

The NCI report describes the administration of the program of the caBIG as having a "very complex organizational structure" and said that information on the programme budget had been inconsistent and difficult to decipher. The Working Group has determined that the money paid to Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC-Frederick and Sapient over the past seven years more than $ 60 million and is "probably much more". It considers that the total expenditures on caBIG to be at least $ 350 million for the years 2004 to 2010, including about 100 million dollars in federal stimulus funds.

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