GEM involves the installation of a local Ensembl database on the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) platform at Griffith University. Ensembl is a joint project between EMBL-EBI and the Sanger Institute consisting of a database containing annotated eukaryotic genomes -- it is a trusted well known bioinformatics resource. Key priority of GEM is to provide secure access to researchers at other institutions to integrate their own research data with the Ensembl dataset. This is achieved using a Distributed Annotation Server (DAS) with Shibboleth -- a middleware product that authenticates users by their home institution user names and passwords. SRB is a client-server middleware that will allow other SRB users to access the Ensembl data without having to maintain their own local copy of it. Users can then query Ensembl data in a high throughput manner using the Perl API to access the data directly from MySQL tables. GEM provides institutions in Australia with a local genome browser that they can query and integrate their own data with securely using the web interface or using SRB.