I'd like us to review the following papers that serve as foundation
materials for the uabgrid computing environment. Reading these documents
should provide a decent background on the approach currently in place on
the UABgrid and help you get a feeling for the motivations behind this
approach. While we will be moving beyond the technologies described in
these papers, we will remain on the path to provide a web-powered
interface for key applications on the UABgrid.
The first paper does a good job of describing a much of the technologies
in place on the current version of UABgrid. This paper was presented at
the SC|06 Grid Computing Environments (GCE) workshop and describes the
implementation of the NC BioPortal. The technologies described are almost
identitical to the approach we took in building UABgrid 1.0, the main
difference being that we leveraged the BlazerID system for identities
rather than managed our own:
http://www.cogkit.org/GCE06/papers/CameraReady_110.pdf
The second paper was submitted to the SC|05 Grid workshop. The final
published version was slightly shorter and was presented during the poster
session of the SC|05 Grid workshop. It describes the construction of the
authentication framework for UABgrid. This framework can be almost
directly combined with the above paper to get a broader perspective on the
UABgrid 1.0 architecture.
http://metric.it.uab.edu/~jpr/uabgrid/docs/web-enabled-grid-auth-final.pdf
The third and final paper was also presented at the SC|06 GCE workshop and
describes a grid web portal that unincludes the use of Pubcookie for
authentication. While it doesn't present any new concepts from the
UABgrid paper above, it does provide an additional perspective on this
type of implementation and is helpful for a broader understanding of how
WebSSO can be leveraged.
http://www.cogkit.org/GCE06/papers/CameraReady_123.pdf
Taken together these papers can act as a road map to the improvement
projects underway for UABgrid 2.0. This version of the UABgrid will find
the Pubcookie infrastructure replaced by Shibboleth and the technology
foundation migrated from OGCEv1 to OGCEv2 portlets running in GridSphere.
Feel free to follow-up with any questions. These readings will help shape
the next stage of the UABgrid project.
~jpr
