Critical Services for Cyberinfrastructure: Accounting, Authentication, Authorization, and Accountability Services

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

This project provides Accounting, Authentication, Authorization and Accountability (AAAA) services for the TeraGrid. The TeraGrid Grid Infrastructure Group will take responsibility for providing the services, with four of the partners in the Grid Infrastructure Group implementing these activities. The University of Chicago will play a coordinating role. The Texas Advanced Computing Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will share responsibility for allocations and proposal management. NCSA will support the authentication and authorization activity, while the San Diego Supercomputer Center and NCSA will be responsible for accounting and accountability. The allocations and proposal management activity comprises the mechanisms by which requests for allocations are received and evaluated - by an external panel if the request is large, and by the staff of the TeraGrid, if the request is small. This includes maintenance and operation of the web-based resource that supports the submission of computer allocation requests and the merit-review process. The authentication and authorization activity maintains the information necessary to authenticate a user through a TeraGrid login and information about the various types of resource access authorized for a particular user's account. This includes support for community accounts associated with science gateways. The accounting and accountability activity records access and usage associated with the various TeraGrid resources, maintaining a central TeraGrid-wide accounting database as well as the policies and mechanisms needed to ensure that accounting information generated associated with individual resources is propagated from the resource providers to the central database in a secure and timely manner. These services are essential to the operation of the TeraGrid which, as the nation's primary computing resource for academic research, is a critical infrastructure for hundreds of research and educational projects across a wide range of disciplines.