Widening the number of e-Infrastructure users with Science Gateways and Identity Federations
Date
2011-11Author
Ardizzone, Valeria
Barbera, Roberto
Bruno, Riccardo
Calanducci, Antonio
Fargetta, Marco
Ingrà, Elisa
La Rocca, Giuseppe
Pistagna, Fabrizio
Ricceri, Rita
Rotondo, Riccardo
Scardaci, Diego
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Grid infrastructures are being built in several areas of the world but, despite the huge
investments made by the European Commission and by other funding agencies, both at national
and international level, the total number of users is in the order of magnitude O(104), much less
than O(107) which is the order of magnitude of the number of users of the international research
and education networks (e. g., GÉANT in Europe) that have been funded more or less the same
level of Grids. The reasons for this are the complexity for non-IT-expert users of the Grid
security, based on a Public Key Infrastructure, the little adoption of standards to let different
middleware be interoperable among each other, and the lack of general frameworks to build
easily customizable high-level user interfaces.
In the recent past, interesting developments have been independently carried out by the Grid
community with the Science Gateways and by the National Research and Education Networks
with the Identity Federations to ease, from one side, the access and use of Grid infrastructures
and, from the other side, to increase the number of users authorised to access network-based
services.
A Science Gateway is a “community-developed set of tools, applications, and data that is
integrated via a portal or a suite of applications, usually in a graphical user interface, that is
further customized to meet the needs of a specific community.”
Identity federation is “federating an entity's identity to facilitate single sign-on or cross-domain
single sign-on. It is an approach of authenticating a user across multiple sites within a company
(intranet) or across independent and disparate domains (extranet) using open standards.” Identity
Federations have the aim of setting up and supporting a common framework for different
organisations to manage accesses to on-line resources. They are already established in many
countries and currently gather a number of people which is in the order of O(107).
In this presentation we intend to show the work done at INFN and Consorzio COMETA in Italy
to develop a framework to easily and quickly build Science Gateways which can be configured as Service Providers of Identity Federations and then potentially accessible by huge numbers of
users. The framework makes use of the Simple API for Grid Applications (SAGA) standard,
defined by the Open Grid Forum, to perform middleware-independent job and data management.
The architecture of the framework will be presented together with a few use cases belonging to
different domains, including cultural heritage and e-collaboration. The advantages to create
Identity Federations and Science Gateways in Africa will also be outlined.