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 will be deployed to enable effective collaboration across multiple sites.
While members of the NA-MIC team currently practice distributed collaboration to develop large
software systems such as Slicer, ITK, and VTK, the process will be expanded to support a broader
community including non-computing professionals and the NA-MIC management team. This resource
hierarchy consists of 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 logs, document
repositories, and FAQ’s will be 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 CMake, and the source code repository
manager cvs will be installed and maintained to support the software development process.
Automated tools for documentation and language-binding generation will also be configured.
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 will be available via dedicated email and phone
support lines. Mechanisms for timely dissemination of information via web pages, email, and formal
documentation will be established. Periodic surveys of the NA-MIC community will provide continual
feedback to technology developers. Creation and maintenance of formal software releases will insure
that NA-MIC researchers have access to robust code that is self-consistent and easy to install. |
