1. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 Development of Usable Grid Services for the Biomedical Community Prof Richard Sinnott Technical Director National e-Science Centre ||| Deputy Director (Technical) Bioinformatics Research Centre University of Glasgow 26 th January 2006

2. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 Overview of BRIDGES Biomedical Research Informatics Delivered by Grid Enabled Services (BRIDGES) NeSC (Edinburgh and Glasgow) and IBM Started October 2003 – successfully concluded end of 2005! Supporting project for CFG project Generating data on hypertension Rat, Mouse, Human genome databases Variety of tools used BLAST, visualisation, … Variety of data sources and formats Microarray data, genome DBs, project partner research data, … Aim is integrated infrastructure supporting Data federation Security

3. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 IT background of scientists From what’s a browser…? to quite IT savvy individuals None of them knew much about the Grid had the time or inclination to really want to learn about how to use the Grid  Idea of asking them to get X.509 certificates a complete non-starter They were largely sceptical fairly tough customers who had research to do wanted software to solve problems not add to them or distract them from their daily work

4. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 BRIDGES Project Synteny Service Information Integrator OGSA-DAI Magna Vista Service VO Authorisation blast ++ +

5. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 Bridges Portal

6. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 www.nesc.ac.uk MagnaVista

7. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 MagnaVista

8. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 Seriously clever solution… Dealing with complex remote data sets where schemas were often not given and they changed at arbitrary times (normally during live demos!) But… they hated it! User interface was far too complicated Pull down menus, tabs, options, … Few of them (actually none!) ever used the profile capabilities  In short a general “don’t have time to read the manual attitude” They used and were comfortable with Google hence we decided to give them a Google-like solution

9. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 GeneVista

10. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 Better solution… But still suffers from changing schemas Requires constant monitoring Remote schema changes manifest as cryptic SQL exceptions to users This used to fix client wrappers to remote databases Off-putting for users Discourages wider take-up

11. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 Grid Blast Interface Allows ‘genome scale’ blasting Transparently uses NGS, ScotGrid, other GU clusters, Condor pools Many databases already deployed across nodes No user certificates Fine grained security at back-end

12. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 Lessons learned The customer is always right! There has to be less middleware push and more scientific pull Understanding requirements crucial  Rapid prototyping, feedback best model… but need time to do this! Public data resource openness Often cannot query directly  Often not easy/possible to find schemas Grid middleware still painful experience But ok for us - should not be for scientists  Why should biologist go on training course to run BLAST on the NGS? Take the certificates away from end users

13. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 Conclusions BRIDGES experiences helping to shape MANY other projects in Glasgow Clinical Trials Genetics & Healthcare Scottish Bioinformatics Research Network Occupational Data Numerous security oriented projects Access to and usage of Grid via Shibboleth...  Happy to discuss in more detail... probably off-line though

14. Usability Talk, 26 th January 2006 Scientific Pull… (Work!) Once we have (securely) connected all relevant data sets simplified access to and usage of HPC resources, wrapped your favourite bioinformatics applications as Grid services... what questions would you like to ask? –How does a cell work? –Why do people who eat less tend to live longer? –How many people across Scotland had a heart attack in the last 5 years took drug X, and of those that did where genes A or B influenced by this drug? –Who has performed an experiment similar to mine and where their results similar? –… We need to be thinking about these things now and making sure the infrastructures we are developing will allow to answer these questions!!!