19,376 research outputs found
Tool support for security-oriented virtual research collaborations
Collaboration is at the heart of e-Science and e-Research
more generally. Successful collaborations must address both
the needs of the end user researchers and the providers
that make resources available. Usability and security are
two fundamental requirements that are demanded by many
collaborations and both concerns must be considered from
both the researcher and resource provider perspective. In
this paper we outline tools and methods developed at the
National e-Science Centre (NeSC) that provide users with
seamless, secure access to distributed resources through
security-oriented research environments, whilst also allowing resource providers to define and enforce their own local access and usage policies through intuitive user interfaces. We describe these tools and illustrate their application in the ESRC-funded Data Management through e-Social Science (DAMES) and the JISC-funded SeeGEO projects
Secure, performance-oriented data management for nanoCMOS electronics
The EPSRC pilot project Meeting the Design Challenges of nanoCMOS Electronics (nanoCMOS) is focused upon delivering a production level e-Infrastructure to meet the challenges facing the semiconductor industry in dealing with the next generation of âatomic-scaleâ transistor devices. This scale means that previous assumptions on the uniformity of transistor devices in electronics circuit and systems design are no longer valid, and the industry as a whole must deal with variability throughout the design process. Infrastructures to tackle this problem must provide seamless access to very large HPC resources for computationally expensive simulation of statistic ensembles of microscopically varying physical devices, and manage the many hundreds of thousands of files and meta-data associated with these simulations. A key challenge in undertaking this is in protecting the intellectual property associated with the data, simulations and design process as a whole. In this paper we present the nanoCMOS infrastructure and outline an evaluation undertaken on the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) and the Andrew File System (AFS) considering in particular the extent that they meet the performance and security requirements of the nanoCMOS domain. We also describe how metadata management is supported and linked to simulations and results in a scalable and secure manner
Integrating security solutions to support nanoCMOS electronics research
The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded Meeting the Design Challenges of nanoCMOS Electronics (nanoCMOS) is developing a research infrastructure for collaborative electronics research across multiple institutions in the UK with especially strong industrial and commercial involvement. Unlike other domains, the electronics industry is driven by the necessity of protecting the intellectual property of the data, designs and software associated with next generation electronics devices and therefore requires fine-grained security. Similarly, the project also demands seamless access to large scale high performance compute resources for atomic scale device simulations and the capability to manage the hundreds of thousands of files and the metadata associated with these simulations. Within this context, the project has explored a wide range of authentication and authorization infrastructures facilitating compute resource access and providing fine-grained security over numerous distributed file stores and files. We conclude that no single security solution meets the needs of the project. This paper describes the experiences of applying X.509-based certificates and public key infrastructures, VOMS, PERMIS, Kerberos and the Internet2 Shibboleth technologies for nanoCMOS security. We outline how we are integrating these solutions to provide a complete end-end security framework meeting the demands of the nanoCMOS electronics domain
Integrating BOINC with Microsoft Excel: A case study
The convergence of conventional Grid computing with public resource computing (PRC) offers potential benefits in the enterprise setting. For this work we took the popular PRC toolkit BOINC and used it to execute a previously monolithic Microsoft Excel financial model across several commodity computers. Our experience indicates that speedup approaching linear may be realised for certain scenarios, and that this approach offers a viable route to leveraging idle desktop PCs in the enterprise
Data Access for LIGO on the OSG
During 2015 and 2016, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
(LIGO) conducted a three-month observing campaign. These observations delivered
the first direct detection of gravitational waves from binary black hole
mergers. To search for these signals, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration uses
the PyCBC search pipeline. To deliver science results in a timely manner, LIGO
collaborated with the Open Science Grid (OSG) to distribute the required
computation across a series of dedicated, opportunistic, and allocated
resources. To deliver the petabytes necessary for such a large-scale
computation, our team deployed a distributed data access infrastructure based
on the XRootD server suite and the CernVM File System (CVMFS). This data access
strategy grew from simply accessing remote storage to a POSIX-based interface
underpinned by distributed, secure caches across the OSG.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, submitted to PEARC1
A Mediated Definite Delegation Model allowing for Certified Grid Job Submission
Grid computing infrastructures need to provide traceability and accounting of
their users" activity and protection against misuse and privilege escalation. A
central aspect of multi-user Grid job environments is the necessary delegation
of privileges in the course of a job submission. With respect to these generic
requirements this document describes an improved handling of multi-user Grid
jobs in the ALICE ("A Large Ion Collider Experiment") Grid Services. A security
analysis of the ALICE Grid job model is presented with derived security
objectives, followed by a discussion of existing approaches of unrestricted
delegation based on X.509 proxy certificates and the Grid middleware gLExec.
Unrestricted delegation has severe security consequences and limitations, most
importantly allowing for identity theft and forgery of delegated assignments.
These limitations are discussed and formulated, both in general and with
respect to an adoption in line with multi-user Grid jobs. Based on the
architecture of the ALICE Grid Services, a new general model of mediated
definite delegation is developed and formulated, allowing a broker to assign
context-sensitive user privileges to agents. The model provides strong
accountability and long- term traceability. A prototype implementation allowing
for certified Grid jobs is presented including a potential interaction with
gLExec. The achieved improvements regarding system security, malicious job
exploitation, identity protection, and accountability are emphasized, followed
by a discussion of non- repudiation in the face of malicious Grid jobs
Semantic security: specification and enforcement of semantic policies for security-driven collaborations
Collaborative research can often have demands on finer-grained security that go beyond the authentication-only paradigm as typified by many e-Infrastructure/Grid based solutions. Supporting finer-grained access control is often essential for domains where the specification and subsequent enforcement of authorization policies is needed. The clinical domain is one area in particular where this is so. However it is the case that existing security authorization solutions are fragile, inflexible and difficult to establish and maintain. As a result they often do not meet the needs of real world collaborations where robustness and flexibility of policy specification and enforcement, and ease of maintenance are essential. In this paper we present results of the JISC funded Advanced Grid Authorisation through Semantic Technologies (AGAST) project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/agast) and show how semantic-based approaches to security policy specification and enforcement can address many of the limitations with existing security solutions. These are demonstrated into the clinical trials domain through the MRC funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/votes) and the epidemiological domain through the JISC funded SeeGEO project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/seegeo)
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Draft grid storage namespace guidelines
The Grid can provide MICE not only with computing (number-crunching) power, but also with a secure global framework allowing users access to data. Although the focus is usually on the mass of experiment data, the Grid also opens up new possibilities for the storage and sharing of other material within the collaboration.
This document provides an introduction to data storage on the Grid and describes the proposal for the directory structures to be used by MICE when registering data files stored on the Grid within a File Catalogue such as LFC
Distributed BLAST in a grid computing context
The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is one of the best known sequence comparison programs available in bioinformatics. It is used to compare query sequences to a set of target sequences, with the intention of finding similar sequences in the target set. Here, we present a distributed BLAST service which operates over a set of heterogeneous Grid resources and is made available through a Globus toolkit v.3 Grid service. This work has been carried out in the context of the BRIDGES project, a UK e-Science project aimed at providing a Grid based environment for biomedical research. Input consisting of multiple query sequences is partitioned into sub-jobs on the basis of the number of idle compute nodes available and then processed on these in batches. To achieve this, we have implemented our own Java-based scheduler which distributes sub-jobs across an array of resources utilizing a variety of local job scheduling systems
Development of grid frameworks for clinical trials and epidemiological studies
E-Health initiatives such as electronic clinical trials and epidemiological studies require access to and usage of a range of both clinical and other data sets. Such data sets are typically only available over many heterogeneous domains where a plethora of often legacy based or in-house/bespoke IT solutions exist. Considerable efforts and investments are being made across the UK to upgrade the IT infrastructures across the National Health Service (NHS) such as the National Program for IT in the NHS (NPFIT) [1]. However, it is the case that currently independent and largely non-interoperable IT solutions exist across hospitals, trusts, disease registries and GP practices â this includes security as well as more general compute and data infrastructures. Grid technology allows issues of distribution and heterogeneity to be overcome, however the clinical trials domain places special demands on security and data which hitherto the Grid community have not satisfactorily addressed. These challenges are often common across many studies and trials hence the development of a re-usable framework for creation and subsequent management of such infrastructures is highly desirable. In this paper we present the challenges in developing such a framework and outline initial scenarios and prototypes developed within the MRC funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project [2]
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