ESP-GRID Wiki

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Evaluation of Shibboleth and PKI for Grids project, (ESP-GRID), based at the University of Oxford.

Wiki managed by Mark Norman and Alun Edwards, July 2005-

Welcome to the ESP-GRID wiki!

Here you will find most of the output from our project. Firstly you may wish to have a look at our [http://users.ox.ac.uk/~markn/ESPGRID/ESPMainProjPlan1_0.pdf original project plan]. We've varied from it only a little, so the main aims have been addressed.

Our first main deliverable was to investigate the requirements for access management for grids in general. This proved more difficult than anticipated, but we now have a host of resources, if you're thinking of looking into this area yourself:

• See our main GridRequirements page for the main findings and a list of useful bibliographic resources on this subject

• The final list of requirements for a generic grid are listed on the RequirementsDoc page

• To inform this work, a lot of reading and summarising have been done regarding use cases for grids: see our UseCases page for plenty of detail and other references

The next work of the project was to evaluate how relevant are Shibboleth and (separately) client-based PKI to these general requirements. Matthew Dovey is producing an evaluation of PKI and grids (see ["PKI Evaluation"]), but a comparison document was prepared mostly addressing the use of Shibboleth, but also looking at the shortcomings of client based PKI. This document is named ShibEvaluation (but also addresses PKI).

We have also done a brief survey of Policy Management technologies and related issues. This document examines methodologies for managing the access management policies between users' home domains, VOs and grids. See PolicyManagementAndExchange for details. (Please note that this document is not yet complete, as we would like feedback from some of those projects that we have written about.)

The project began a collaboration with the NeSC team at Glasgow. This was to build demonstrators of Shibbolized access to grid resources and applications. This has been largely completed and is discussed further at the ["NeSC Shibbolized Resources"] page, from where access to a demonstrator that you can try out is anticipated soon.

Richard Sinnott, of the NeSC team, described the work at GGF 16 (at Athens in February 2006). While we were there, a discussion within the [http://www.ggf.org/gf/event_schedule/index.php?id=213 Grid and Shib Investigators' (BOF) meeting] showed that there was some confusion regarding the nature of what is exactly a Virtual Organisation (VO)? As a consequence of this discussion, we produced some thoughts entitled [:VODefinition:Towards a definition of a VO]. This is currently a topic of debate on the [http://www.federation.org.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shibgrid-bof GGF shibgrid-bof] mailing list.

Final evaluation: As we come towards the end of our project, we begin to self-evaluate our work and to get feedback from data owners, users and developers of the demonstrators. See the EvaluationPages for details as this work is carried out.

We are also expected to produce recommendations' and possibly a roadmap for the UK e-Science community with regard to the use of Shibboleth in future. To this end, a ["Final recommendations for e-Science"] page is currently being prepared. Our anticipation is that a roadmap would be too prescriptive at this stage, but a list of recommendations would be appropriate.

ESP-GRID Work Packages

In direct relation to the [http://users.ox.ac.uk/~markn/ESPGRID/ESPMainProjPlan1_0.pdf project plan]:

(For Alun and Mark), see FinalWorkplan for last few months' work and ProjectWrapUpNotes for general quick notes regarding things to do and things we're waiting on.

We have a page of MeetingNotes, including conferences attended and meetings with collaborators.

Quick starting points and links:

• RecentChanges: see where people are currently working

• FindPage: search or browse the database in various ways

• SiteNavigation: get an overview over this site and what it contains

• GridRequirements: work in progress from Mark and Alun

  • RequirementsBibliography sources and references to articles and papers used in this Requirements gathering exercise

  • FocusGroup notes and reports from the focus group meeting

  • UseCases use cases for a generic grid

• ESP-GRID mailing list at Jisc Mail http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=ESP-GRID for general discussion for the project.

• RTS calendar http://rts.oucs.ox.ac.uk/calendar/month.php

For guidance as to how to find your way around and to add information to this wiki, see the InitialGuidance.