This report summarises my attendance at GGF15 and its relevance to current NeSC activities.
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Monday 3 October
GGF15 Opening – Mark Linesch eScience and Cyberinfrastructure- The Middleware Challenge
Tony Hey, Vice President, Technical Computing for Microsoft CorporationOGSA-Authorization
Working Group
• Community Activity: Leveraging Site Infrastructure for Multi-Site Grids th
Tuesday 4 October
Business Case for Why Leading IT Organizations are Adopting Grids
Entertainment and Digital Content
What is the Software Licensing Model for Grids?
The security focus of NeSC-Glasgow (including AAA action line in UK ETF and numerous projects such as BRIDGES, VOTES, DyVOSE, GHI, GEMEPS, ESP-Grid, GEODE) provided the main motivation for attending the GGF15 meeting. The session on Community Activity: Leveraging Site Infrastructure for
Multi-Site Grids had numerous highly relevant presentations and was the primary purpose for my attending the GGF meeting.
The workshop itself explored how Grid security technologies could be used for VOs spanning multiple sites and how existing security infrastructures could be leveraged. One of the key focuses of the workshop was Shibboleth and advanced authorisation infrastructures which is highly relevant to NeSC Glasgow projects.
Ken Klingstein gave a presentation on the Internet2 Shibboleth middleware. The uptake and widespread acceptance of Shibboleth were described, along with the wider issues of policy and legal frameworks. An outline of the challenges that had been faced in the US in terms of privacy protection and attribute release via Shibboleth were described. This is something that has not been touched yet by the Grid community but might well be something that becomes more important.
Arnie Miles gave an interesting presentation showing how they had integrated Condor and Shibboleth at
Georgetown University. This might well be something we explore at NeSC Glasgow in our Shibboleth evaluation and early adoption plans. I’d like to get one of the students I will supervise to look into this in more detail.

Jim Basney gave his MyProxy talk and outlined how this middleware can be used for unified site authentication. We use this software already in several projects, so recent developments are well worth monitoring. I did not hear anything in this talk that was new to me however.
Marty Humphrey gave a talk outlining how his group had integrated MyProxy with Pubcookie. This was a fairly complex talk and not really relevant to NeSC Glasgow’s activities. The idea of Pubcookie and how they had integrated it with MyProxy did not align itself with the way in which we have been using
PubCookie within our Shibboleth explorations at NeSC Glasgow.
Von Welch gave his GridShib talk. I was aware of the designs and plans of GridShib that Von and his team had been following as such there were no real surprises. That said he did show an initial implementation of this middleware in action. We have said that we will provide an evaluation of this software as part of our ESP-Grid project with Oxford University.
David Chadwick gave a presentation and demonstration of the dynamic delegation of authority between sites software put together within the DyVOSE project (led by NeSC Glasgow). This was well received.
Tom Barton also gave an interesting talk and demonstration of the Signet and Grouper software for distributed attribute administration. This looked highly relevant to NeSC Glasgow activities and offered similar functionality to the existing PERMIS software but is purely web based. I plan on getting a final year undergraduate/postgraduate student to explore this software (which is now at beta level).
The panel discussion at the end of this workshop was quite informative. It is clear that the security folk are following an aggressive technology push approach, but need real live applications to ensure that this meets the wider Grid community needs. This is where NeSC Glasgow fits in. It is important that real needs and real standards are combined. Hence our work on most NeSC Glasgow projects is exploring latest developments in this area.
I note that I would have liked to attend the privacy and security in health grids workshop also but this ran in parallel with the security workshop – a clash which should have been avoided.
The other meetings I attended were only indirectly relevant to NeSC Glasgow activities. The licensing meeting was interesting, but did not come up with real solutions or concrete proposals for how licensing issues and Grid technologies can be integrated. Similarly, there were no concrete ideas or suggestions for standards in this area.
The entertainment and digital content workshop was of interest based upon the PGPGrid work. However, once again this was not offering anything new – just looking at how Grids are being used by major animation companies for rendering etc. One interesting discussion did take place on security however. I had not considered splitting the data and jobs so that compromise of data/jobs on one site would not result in the movie frames being accessed etc, i.e. you need all jobs and data composed to get the video frames worth stealing etc. There might well be scenarios in other NeSC Glasgow projects where such issues come about, e.g. statistical disclosure in clinical trials.