All, On this mornings call I volunteered to see what was up with the HPC profile working group with respect to authentication. Recall that we need some sort of authentication story in the short run or we cannot put together any form or realistic, cross-organizational, compute grids with BES, or for that matter data grids using RNS/ByteIO. Attached is a short white paper from the HPC Profile WG (or maybe just the three authors). It is BES-specific, but I think the ideas may be generalized to a broader set of OGSA services. I think we should consider it, or something like it. Note that it does NOT deal with the ultimate authentication and delegation problem that we will face. Rather, I personally (speaking only for myself, and not even the people in my research group) think that this sort of solution is a stop gap that we can use for awhile, and that we will ultimately deprecate in favor of whatever comes out of the OGSA-Authentication WG. So, for your reading pleasure - and with my thanks to Marty for giving me a copy. A Andrew Grimshaw Professor of Computer Science University of Virginia 434-982-2204 grimshaw@cs.virginia.edu