On Feb. 22 I gave a presentation to the Open Science Grid (OSG) Campus Infrastructures Community (CIC) entitled U-Bolt: Campus Identity Integration for Decentralized Systems. This talk covered the following topics:
- UC3's identity problem
- How we onboard new users (UC3 registration demo)
- U-Bolt - the tools that make this possible
- Technical overview of UNIX/Linux account services
- UC3 case study
- How to address identity integration problems at your site
(UC3 is the University of Chicago Computing Cooperative, a "campus grid" organization focused on distributed high-throughput computation (DHTC). Our goal is to make computation available to a wide variety of needful users within the campus, and to do so with a minimum of setup and using existing resources that may not be occupied at all times. If you're a University of Chicago affiliate with computational needs that might be suitable for DHTC systems, we invite you to visit our site and register for access.) This talk covers some of the abstract background for our need, but also gets into the gritty details of how we made campus identity integration (CII) work, what preconditions were met to enable it to work, and how this approach can be extended to other campuses with differing requirements and preconditions. It also introduces a toolbox called U-Bolt which aims to be a general purpose kit for accomplishing CII under a variety of circumstances. I'll cover more details of this in other posts. The slides for this talk are online at the UC3 Presentations page. They are conceptually part of a larger presentation — too big to actually present — on identity topics in the cluster environment. I'll be giving another version of this talk, highlighting a different subset of topics, at the OSG All Hands Meeting in Indianapolis on March 12.