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
434-982-2204
grimshaw@cs.virginia.edu