Building Simple, Easy-to-Use Grids with Styx Grid Services and SSH

Grid systems have a reputation for being difficult to build and use. We describe how the ease of use of the Styx Grid Services (SGS) software can be combined with the security and trusted nature of the Secure Shell (SSH) to build simple Grid systems that are secure, robust and easy to use and administer. We present a case study of how this method is applied to a science project (GCEP), allowing the scientists to share resources securely and in a manner that does not place unnecessary load on system administrators. Applications on the Grid can be run exactly as if they were local programs from the point of view of the scientists. The resources in the GCEP Grid are diverse, including dedicated clusters, Condor pools and data archives but the system we present here provides a uniform interface to all these resources. The same methods can be used to access Globus resources via Condor-G or GSISSH if required.