UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
Cyberinfrastructure (CI) that supports the global research community by linking together researchers, computational resources, instruments, and data, has had a significant impact on the science and engineering research communities. At the heart of CI is trust, between collaborators, organizations, providers, users, applications and services. Security services, specifically authentication and authorization, are foundational services that facilitate trust between those entities. Without the establishment and maintenance of trust, collaborative relationships served by CI are jeopardized.
The goals of the proposed CILogon project are to maintain and provide critical enhancements for CI security technologies developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and to foster science and engineering by helping additional communities build secure CI on these services.
Intellectual merit: The security services of the CILogon project address critical security needs of scientific and engineering researchers, as evidenced by their wide use. The project team has a proven track record of providing quality software services to a variety of science communities, along with strategic leadership in the area of security. Team members are active participants in the NSF TeraGrid and Open Science Grid projects and are actively engaged with other NSF grid projects including LTER, OOI, NVO, LIGO, and WATERS.
Broader impacts: The CILogon project proposes to enhance the NSF CI for research and education by providing robust, well-supported software services that facilitate secure access to CI. These services are used in communities such as magnetic fusion (NFC), climate research (ESG), high-energy physics (WLCG), and computational chemistry (GridChem), as well as in CI provided by TeraGrid, EGEE, Open Science Grid, NERSC and NCSA. The project has a strong collaboration with Internet2 regarding the integration of Shibboleth with grid security (via GridShib) to bridge security of higher education campuses to computational grids, broadening the impact of grid infrastructure to the educational community.