Walden: a scalable solution for grid account management

A large and diverse consortium of grid clusters, as can be found in a university setting, requires a flexible authorization model that is scalable, extensible and easy to administer. Current approaches to grid authorization suffer from administrative interfaces that don´t scale, authorization models that don´t provide needed functionality, or both. This paper proposes a solution with initial implementation that uses existing standards to support the requirements of such a consortium of grid clusters. Our solution eliminates the need to manage authentication and authorization on a per-host basis, and implements a mechanism to temporarily bind a grid user to a local guest account on grid resource.