Special:Badtitle/NS100:Service
Service
The unifying goal of the Service Core is to provide the world-class infrastructure necessary to insure the success of NA-MIC.. We view the NA-MIC effort as an extended community – the collaborative research teams of NA-MIC; and the “customers” of NA-MIC, i.e., the biomedical research community at large – that will utilize the open software and data that NA-MIC will produce. To achieve this goal, the Service Core has four aims:
- establish the computational infrastructure;
- deploy collaboration resources;
- support the software development process, and
- foster the NA-MIC community.
The first aim is to establish the spectrum of computational resources required to support NA-MIC operations. These resources include hardware, operating systems, compilers, and communications equipment. The principal uses of these computational resources are to support the Core 2 software development process, to insure the seamless integration of software and data; and to provide platforms for the delivery of technology to NA-MIC and its customers.
A hierarchy of resources has been deployed to enable effective collaboration across multiple sites as noted by the second aim. While members of the NA-MIC team practiced distributed collaboration to develop large software systems such as Slicer, ITK, VTK and http://www.cmake.org CMake] prior to the formation of the alliance, the process has been expanded to support a broader community including non-computing professionals and the NA-MIC management team. These resources include wikis, email lists, IM, phone, conferencing facilities, project management tools, and posted web pages with a secure database providing rapid lookup of information and resource management. Additional resources in the form of web logs, bug trackers, email digests, document repositories, and FAQ’s are used to archive these interactions for future reference.
The process described in Core 2 requires intense, daily interaction between software developers. Continuous testing utilizes the matrix of resources deployed by the first aim, and ongoing collaboration is necessary to address problems, as they are uncovered. In the third aim, tools such as the testing dashboard DART, the cross-platform build tool [www.cmake.org CMake], and the source code repository manager cvs have been installed and maintained to support the software development process. Automated tools for documentation and language-binding generation are also employed on a continuous basis.
The final aim of the Service Core is to coordinate with the Training and Dissemination cores to foster the growth of the NA-MIC community. Personnel are available via dedicated email and phone support lines. Mechanisms for timely dissemination of information via web pages, email, and formal documentation have been established. Periodic surveys of the NA-MIC community provide continual feedback to technology developers. Creation and maintenance of formal software releases insures that NA-MIC researchers have access to robust code that is self-consistent and easy to install.
