ESP-GRID Wiki
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 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 (see RequirementsBibliography)
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 client-based PKI to these general requirements. A comparison document was prepared addressing the use of Shibboleth and PKI, using the assumptions that are usually taken to support the use of client based PKI. This document is named ShibPKIEvaluation.
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 PolicyManagement for details.
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 you can access demonstrators that you can try out.
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 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 Towards a definition of a VO. This then became a topic of debate on the GGF shibgrid-bof mailing list.
Final evaluation: Towards the end of our project, we began to self-evaluate our work and to get feedback from data owners, users and developers of the demonstrators. See the EvaluationPages for the summaries and conclusions of this evaluation work.
We were 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 finalised. We have two papers that were presented at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting and these formed the pre-cursors for the final report and recommendations. We thought that a roadmap was too prescriptive for this purpose, but that a list of recommendations would be appropriate.
ESP-GRID Work Packages
In direct relation to the project plan:
Work_Package |
Title |
Status |
1 |
Project Management |
Ongoing |
2 |
Evaluation |
Ongoing |
3 |
Dissemination |
Ongoing |
4 |
Grid Architecture Overview |
Completed |
GridRequirements Requirements gathering from literature and focus group |
Completed |
|
Supplementary document: RequirementsBibliography sources and references to articles and papers used in this Requirements gathering exercise |
Completed |
|
Supplementary document: * FocusGroup notes and reports from the focus group meeting |
Completed |
|
Supplementary document: * UseCases use cases for a generic grid |
Completed |
|
Main output document: RequirementsDoc |
Completed |
|
5 & 6 |
PKI Evaluation & Shibboleth Evaluation |
Completed |
Main output document: ShibPKIEvaluation |
Completed |
|
7 |
Policy Management |
Completed |
Main output document: PolicyManagement |
Completed |
|
Supplementary document: VODefinition |
Completed |
|
8 |
Grid Prototype |
Completed |
Main output details: NeSC_Shibbolized_Resources |
Completed |
|
9 |
Grid integration/Migration |
|
Main output document: Final_recommendations_for_e-Science |
Final edits |
|
10 |
Final reports |
|
Main output document: EvaluationPages |
Completed |
|
Final report (& budget) to JISC |
Not started |
(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. See also PhaseTwoWork for our initial ideas as to what to work on in the requirements/user analysis that could be Phase 2.
We have a page of MeetingNotes, including conferences attended and meetings with collaborators. Some ProjectReports are here too.
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
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.