BCIG SPEAKER EVENT: "Sciware
- A solution for providing scientific software to NIH researchers"
- view the seminar archive
Clinical
Center (Building 10) Medical Board Room (Room 2C116)
DESCRIPTION: Today many researchers at NIH install and maintain
scientific software on their local computers. This requires obtaining some
computer skills and takes time away from their research. It can also lead to
frustration, security issues, and trepidation when it comes time to upgrading
the software. A solution being developed at CIT will allow researchers to
connect their computers via a simple network connection to a server containing a
variety of scientific software that is ready to run. The solution is called "Sciware"
and involves CIT staff installing and maintaining scientific software on NFS and
Samba servers that can then be accessed over the network from a researcher’s
computer. NFS and Samba are the two leading network protocols available on most
computers so most NIH computers are ready to connect. Once connected to the
Sciware server the server appears as a disk drive full of scientific software.
Researchers can use the various software applications while CIT staff worry
about upgrading and otherwise maintaining the software. And since the software
runs on the researcher's computer and not the server there are no major issues
of scale at the server level. Sciware can scale to support many applications
serving many computers. Currently supported computers are Windows, Mac OS X,
Linux, Solaris, and Irix but others could be supported if the need arose.
Currently the available scientific applications number over forty and cover
diverse disciplines such as Image Processing, Molecular Modeling, Math,
Statistical Analysis, and Sequence Analysis.
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3:00 - 4:30 pm June 15, 2006
Jim Sullivan
Jim Sullivan is a contractor in the Scientific
Computing Branch of the Division of Computer System
Services at the Center for Information Technology at
the NIH. He has over twenty years experience in
computer systems development, systems integration,
systems administration, software development and
project management. He has a B.S. degree in
Biochemistry and a M.S. degree in Biomedical
Engineering. He joined CIT in 1984 and has developed
and managed PC and UNIX system services to NIH
researchers including the development of a PC-based
data capture system in NIH’s Clinical Pathology
Department and CIT’s Advanced Laboratory Workstation (ALW)
system offering UNIX workstation applications and
support. He also worked in the early days of the NIH’s
Incident Response Team on UNIX security and Y2K issues
and managed the Y2K remediation for all NIH UNIX
systems. He oversaw the deployment of an NIH-wide
automated IT inventory system and researched UNIX
security software. He is now developing the Sciware
system and researching the feasibility of
collaboration services based on Wikis.
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