Collaborative Research: Distributed Account Management Middleware

Trustees Of Boston University, Boston

Investigators

Abstract

This is a collaborative project involving University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Boston University. The project will build, deploy, test and package a middleware-oriented distributed account management system. The system supports the information exchange between grid-enabled systems that are necessary to implement distributed account management, resource allocation, usage accounting, and monitoring functions in a heterogeneous grid environment. The system will be coupled to the a grid transactions system to form a completely operational, grid-enabled reference implementation. The ability to manage user accounts, provide access control over its resources, manage allocations and generate usage reports in a distributed fashion is critical to the expansion of the grid. The proposed system can be used to build a highly automated, scalable account management system that will work across disparate computing systems. The software will be packaged as an open-source distribution for further development and adaptation by the grid community.