Grid ID Management based on Distributed Agents using SPML

The grid is a kind of computational infrastructures that interconnect high performance resources (e.g. super computer, mass storage, specialized experimental device) which are geologically distributed. Everyone can use the grid network as a single system. To connect each resource with the grid and provide service to every user who requires the resource, the grid middleware should be installed. The most popular middleware is the Globus toolkit and GSI (grid security infrastructure) takes charge the security part in the Globus toolkit. GSI is based on the PKI (public key infrastructure) and supports certificate-based mutual authentication, SSO (single sign-on) using X.509 proxy certificate and simple access control using grid-map. However GSI is hard to manage the grid account identifier and to process authentication or authorization management on each resource manually. This paper proposes agents-based distributed management architecture for the grid environment. An administrator could maintain identical policies for resource at single point. SPML (service provisioning markup language) also enables the administrator to express various tasks and to support the extensibility. Proposed scheme utilizes central server only to manage the resources´ policy, and maintains every policy in each resource. Therefore proposed scheme avoids SPF (single point of failure) problem while running the grid