Identity Management and Presented at Southeast Regional Conferences

Leading change across distributed IT service providers requires extensive engagement. Implementing identity and access management (IAM) changes requires involvement of a broad spectrum of constituents. Using techniques developed during ERP and other large-scale change initiatives, we engage the university community in developing requirements and architecture for successful IAM changes.

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.

This session will outline the advantages of organizing working partnerships and business relationships in a federated context. Topics will include InCommon, eAuthentication, and other federations. Attendees will gain a basic understanding of the principles of identity management, the difference between authentication and authorization, and the benefit of federating under common trust policies and infrastructure, as well as an understanding of the general technical process flows and interoperability requirements among federated organizations.