GridNet Funding Report: Open Grid Forum 18
September 11-14, 2006
Washington DC, USA
Jipu Jiang
National e-Science Centre
University of Glasgow
As a member of the National e-Science Centre and researcher on the JISC funded
Glasgow early adoption of Shibboleth (GLASS) project, I attended the OGF 18
conference held in Washington DC, US. I attended the following sessions:
Monday, September 11, 2006
08:30 am – 09:00 am: GGF18 Opening
09:00 am – 10:00 am: Keynote: Vision for 21st Century Discovery
10:30 am – 12:00 pm: Shibboleth for Grids: Experiences and Interoperability (1/4)
02:00 pm – 03:30 pm: Shibboleth for Grids: Experiences and Interoperability (2/4)
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
10:00 am – 11:30 am: Shibboleth for Grids: Experiences and Interoperability (3/4)
01:30 pm – 03:00 pm: Shibboleth for Grids: Experiences and Interoperability (4/4)
04:00 pm – 05:30 pm: Security Talks
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
10:00 am – 11:30 am: OGSA AuthZ WG
01:30 pm – 03:00 pm: Education and Training Community Group Workshop (1/2)
Thursday, September 14
08:30 am – 09:15 am: GGF Closing
09:30 am – 11:00 am: Storage Grids in Healthcare
11:30 am – 01:00 pm: Topics in Identity Management
The Meeting Experiences
I attended the OGF 18 (previously known as Global Grid Forum (GGF)) meeting in
Washington DC primarily for the security related work. Specifically, the Shibboleth for
Grids workshop, which lasted for two days, was my main interest. My work in NeSC is
mainly focused on Grid security. The GLASS (GLASgow early Adoption of Shibboleth)
project, which I am working on right now, was proposed to explore and to implement
Shibboleth technologies in the University of Glasgow. The workshop presented the
updates since Grid and Shib BoF at GGF16 in Athens. A talk was given by Prof. Richard
Sinnott on behalf of NeSC to introduce the new work we have done in both GLASS and
DyVOSE project for adopting Shibboleth technology in the Grid environment.
Attendance of this session helped me better understand international Shibboleth related
work and related components such as new versions of Shibboleth.
During the talks in the Shibboleth for Grid workshop, the most interesting one to me was
on the MAMS project from Australia. The group have done a lot of integration work
between Shibboleth and the GridSphere Portal framework. They now have a whole set of
tools running on the GridSphere portal framework. Although not much their work
involves Grid, they really did some impressive explorations in portal and Shibboleth
integration. I believe future collaboration with them could greatly improve our work in
NeSC.
To expand and update my knowledge in the Grid Security field, I attended the Security
Talk session right after the 4th Shibboleth for Grid workshop. The delegate, Blair
Dillaway, from Microsoft presented an XML-based Assertion Language for security
policies called SecPAL. He also gave a interesting demo after the talk.
I attended the Education and Training Community Group Workshop. This workshop
may well assist me in teaching of the Advanced MSc students - one of my duties in NeSC.
As one of the aims of the DyVOSE project, a Grid Computing module was created to
provide hands on Grid training to Advanced Computing Science MSc students at the
University of Glasgow. The methods learned from the workshop will be very helpful in
delivering the course materials to the students.
Besides adopting Shibboleth to the University of Glasgow, the GLASS project is also
going to use this technology to provide secure access to NHS resources/data. Through
collaboration with Glasgow Southern General Hospital, a fine-grained portal is to be built
to provide access and usage of brain trauma patient data. To gain better understanding
about the Grid technologies in the health domain, I attended the Storage Grids in
Healthcare session.
I went to the Topics in Identity Management session in the last timeslot of the OGF18.
Understanding issues raised in identity management from other people’s experiences is
crucial to a success adoption of Shibboleth to the unified account management system in
University of Glasgow.
To conclude, I found OGF18 to be a wonderful and rewarding opportunity which allowed
me to present NeSC related work and understand other people’s work and experience at
the same time. I would also hope to continue these efforts in the future.