GridwiseTech has developed AdHoc, an advanced framework for sharing geographically distributed data and compute resources. It simplifies the resource management and makes cooperation secure and effective.

The premise of AdHoc is to enable each member of the associated institution to control access to his or her resources without an IT administrator’s help, and with high security level of any exposed data or applications assured.

It takes 3 easy steps to establish cooperation within AdHoc: create a virtual organization, add resources and share them. The application can be implemented within any organization to exchange data and resources or between institutions to join forces for more efficient results.

AdHoc was initially created for a consortium of hospitals and institutions to share medical data sets. As a technical partner in that project, GridwiseTech implemented the Security Framework to provide access to that data and designed a graphical tool to facilitate the administration of the entire system.

Every participant agreed to grant access to its resources to other partners in the project. Analysis of more patients’ records meant bigger samples and, potentially, better research. As most of these data are subject to a strict privacy policy, they could only be accessible for specific research purposes within defined time periods. In each case, patients’ identity remained anonymous and they provided consent to use their data for experiments. AdHoc enabled easy dynamic access rights management and, at the same time, prevented unauthorized access to sensitive information.

“Advanced international scientific consortia need to set up ad-hoc collaborations. For this reason, we used the concept of Virtual Organizations, introduced by international Grid projects. However, to create such a VO and grant people access to different resources, a lot of administrative effort is needed, including admins’ time and paperwork. GridwiseTech's AdHoc software is the first application I know of truly dynamic Virtual Organizations, where users themselves are responsible for their resources and can share them easy in real time without involving an administrator” said Andrea De Luca, Clinician and Researcher at the Institute of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Catholic University of Rome, Italy.

In this critical domain, the GridwiseTech software system proved to be versatile. Its combination of security and simplicity makes it a unique tool for rapid collaborations and modern e-Science.