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Getting a qualified medical examination can be difficult for people in remote areas because medical staff available can either be inaccessible or it might lack expert knowledge at proper level. Telemedicine technologies can help in such situations. On one hand, such technologies allow highly qualified doctors to consult remotely, thereby increasing the quality of diagnosis and plan treatment. On the other hand, computer-aided analysis of the research results, anamnesis and information on similar cases assist medical staff in their routine activities and decision-making.

Creating telemedicine system for a particular domain is a laborious process. It’s not sufficient to pick proper medical experts and to fill the knowledge base of the analytical module. It’s also necessary to organize the entire infrastructure of the system to meet the requirements in terms of reliability, fault tolerance, protection of personal data and so on. Tools with reusable infrastructure elements, which are common to such systems, are able to decrease the amount of work needed for the development of telemedicine systems.

An interactive tool for creating distributed telemedicine systems is described in the article. A list of requirements for the systems is presented; structural solutions for meeting the requirements are suggested. A composition of such elements applicable for distributed systems is described in the article. A cardiac telemedicine system is described as a foundation of the tool

One of the most widely used storage solutions in WLCG is a Disk Pool Manager (DPM) developed and supported by SDC/ID group at CERN. Recently DPM went through a massive overhaul to address scalability and extensibility issues of the old code.

New system was called DMLite. Unlike the old DPM that was based on daemons, DMLite is arranged as a library that can be loaded directly by an application. This approach greatly improves performance and transaction rate by avoiding unnecessary inter-process communication via network as well as threading bottlenecks.

DMLite has a modular architecture with its core library providing only the very basic functionality. Backends (storage engines) and frontends (data access protocols) are implemented as plug-in modules. Doubtlessly DMLite wouldn't be able to completely replace DPM without GridFTP as it is used for most of the data transfers in WLCG.

In DPM GridFTP support was implemented in a Data Storage Interface (DSI) module for Globus’ GridFTP server. In DMLite an effort was made to rewrite a GridFTP module from scratch in order to take advantage of new DMLite features and also implement new functionality. The most important improvement over the old version is a redirection capability.

With old GridFTP frontend a client needed to contact SRM on the head node in order to obtain a transfer URL (TURL) before reading or writing a file. With new GridFTP frontend this is no longer necessary: a client may connect directly to the GridFTP server on the head node and perform file I/O using only logical file names (LFNs). Data channel is then automatically redirected to a proper disk node.

This renders the most often used part of SRM unnecessary, simplifies file access and improves performance. It also makes DMLite a more appealing choice for non-LHC VOs that were never much interested in SRM.

With new GridFTP frontend it's also possible to access data on various DMLite-supported backends like HDFS, S3 and legacy DPM.