Table 1.

Characterization of the three stages of federation, as would be applicable to a production bioinformatics computation and data infrastructure

Stage	Degree of federation	Scalability	Complexity deployment	Complexity operation	Technology maturity
Stage 1: Central compute and data, local data access	Low	Medium	Low	Medium	High
Stage 2: Central compute and data, peer data access	Medium	Medium	Medium	Medium	High
Stage 3: Central compute and data, peer compute and data access	High	High	Medium	Hi	Medium

Note: Deg. of fed.: degree of federation (i.e. the complement of the degree of centralization). scalability: Ability to scale with increasing number of users. Complexity-d: Complexity of the deployment. Complexity-o: Complexity of the operation. Technology maturity: Maturity level currently of the technologies needed to support this stage of federation.