Grid architecture for scientitic communities

Abstract

Sharing of resources among virtual organizations (VO) has been termed the grid problem. At the heart of this problem is development and acceptance of a protocol to share, discover and compose services. However significant challenges arise in monitoring, accounting and securing any grid infrastucture. VOs of any size should be able to build their own cyberinfrastructure (CI) by discovering and then composing services to build higher level capabilities that they need. These community's CI could be dynamically expandable, persistent and migratable while using resources across adminstrative domains. In this paper we will present several VO based grid architecture and focuse on the nanotechnology community CI called the nanoHUB. The nanoHUB uses virtualization technologies to isolate the infrastructure from the local administrative domain. Virtual machine migration and virtual networking techniques allow the infrastructure to be dynamic and adapt to the underlying physical system. Moreover by using virtual machine the users are provided with a sand box that serve as a development platform for their software an as a entry point to physical grids. Finally, we will cover the security issues in VO access to multiple grid infrastructure and present our work towards using shibboleth witin the nanoHUB. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.