Five in focus, Summer 2006

NCSA contributes more than 35 teraflops of compute power and a five-petabyte mass storage system to the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid, an open scientific discovery infrastructure combining leadership-class resources at nine partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource. Expert staff also assist TeraGrid users through the Operations Center, creating and managing user accounts and disseminating information to users. But innovative software from NCSA is also key to the TeraGrid's success. Here are five examples of what the center contributes.

1. AMIE: Provides automated management of grid resource allocations, user information, user login accounts, and the reporting of usage across a distributed system.

3. MyProxy: Allows users to manage grid credentials using standard authentication methods. (see below)

4. VMI: Addresses availability, usability, and management in large-scale storage area networks interconnected over wide-area grids.

3. MyProxy key to grid efforts; MyProxy developer key to the university

All told, MyProxy is used worldwide by more than 200 sites. It allows users of grid services to store their credential in a repository and retrieve a proxy credential whenever and wherever one is needed. Users avoid juggling multiple private key and certificate files.

A number of projects benefit from it. The TeraGrid incorporates MyProxy as part of the Common TeraGrid Software Stack to provide a uniform interface to credential management services across its sites, and MyProxy recently was adopted by both the TeraGrid Ticketing System and the TeraGrid User Portal to provide a common authentication mechanism.

The LHC Computing Grid, which spans more than 100 sites and 100,000 CPUs, is using MyProxy as a component in their credential renewal service for long-running jobs. The Earth System Grid and FusionGrid projects use MyProxy as a component in their portal-based user registration systems, to issue credentials to new grid users easily. The DOE NERSC Center is using MyProxy to issue credentials based on One-Time Password tokens for hardware-based grid single sign-on.

MyProxy has been used in many grid computing projects, including NEESgrid, EU DataGrid, and the NASA Information Power Grid. MyProxy is included in the NSF Middleware Initiative GRIDS Center software distribution, the Virtual Data Toolkit, and the Globus Toolkit.

MyProxy's lead developer, NCSA's Jim Basney, was honored in the Spring of 2006 with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Chancellor's Academic Professional Excellence (CAPE) award. In presenting the award to Jim, Chancellor Richard Herman said that Jim "personifies the mission of our campus: to research, to learn, to serve. His depth of knowledge, his close attention to users, his groundbreaking research -- all are found in one man eminently able to advance the goals of NCSA and Illinois."

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Five in focus, Summer 2006