Collaborative Technologies and Presented at Southeast Regional Conferences

In the summer of 2007, Clemson University faced a large-scale e-mail system implementation. Looking for innovative ways to maximize limited staff resources, IT support managers created the Situation Room. Using Adobe Connect, support managers linked in real time to support personnel in the field to provide expert advice and up-to-date information throughout the implementation. The experience was successful, and the Situation Room was used to manage fall semester start-up support issues. Now at any time during support hours, IT personnel can enter the virtual room to find out about support issue trends and systems status and to access subject experts.

This presentation will describe the identity management infrastructure of the UAB grid computing project, known as UABgrid. Its development is based on accomplishments of two NSF middleware projects at UAB, which focused on building NMI-enabled, open source tools for support of collaboration within virtual organizations that span institutional boundaries, are autonomous, and are collections of attributes. The middleware solution is known as myVocs and uses Shibboleth for identity management and attribution distribution, Globus for distributed computations, and GridShib to bind Shibboleth and Globus. UABgrid is now expanding its grid computing components to include metascheduling of jobs across multiple HPC clusters across the Internet.