What is LSG

LSG has really nothing to do with Grid computing. It is a way to organize a presentation layer (possibly web-based, but the demo we got was a desktop app) consisting of multiple components that communicate  using a common pub/sub model.
Each component provides a view for one LSG "application". Each application consists of one or more "plugins". These are effectively web services that wrap some specific functionality, for example an NCBI plugin is used to access NCBI e-utils services.
Thus LSG is a framework that accommodates plugins that interact through the common pub/sub bus.

This project is the first attempt from Lilly to release LSG as open source. We are a bit of a guineapigs in this sense.

Support:
We should have good tech support from Lilly, however I hope UoM will not have to interact too tightly with them 

Lilly IT is a Microsoft shop:

LSG plugins are .NET services, this means that developing new plugins requires a deep understanding of c# and .NET technology. No java as far as I can tell.
some hacking required to develop new plugins. Some examples were given during the meeting from which it was clear that c# expertise is needed (along with some luck )
But hopefully we will not need to do any of that -- the Karma people are the only ones to interface with LSG directly (see arch. figure in the parent page).

However we do have an installation disk and I wsill attempt to install on a Windows machine. Will update this page when that happens.
The most interesting LSG plugins are Lilly proprietary, however the installation disk that we got includes 3 open source plugins to try it out. One of them is a NCBI plugin. This is the one we are going to use for our main integration test case.