Capability and content ministry economic development

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A note about formatting:

Special types of formatting are used in this document to identify key pieces of information.

TECHNOLOGICAL CAPABILITY: ROADMAP BACKGROUND PAPER 2 3 OF 54

• Collaboration: The tools required to enable those in the R&E sector to work together towards common goals.

Such tools might be generic (i.e. able to be used for a range of purposes; not specific to particular disciplines) or more specialised (i.e. customised to support the
requirements of a particular project or discipline).

Connection: Advanced Networks

• Internet2’s Abilene network, launched in 1999 and upgraded in 2003, will shortly be replaced by NewNet; and

• CA*Net4 represents the fourth incarnation of Canada’s network since 1993, not including other less major upgrades.

Middleware has been described as the ‘glue’ that holds the infrastructure for e-research together, consisting of programs that “provide essential access, communication, accounting, security, trust, and co-ordination services between the (computational and data) resources of the grid and the higher-level services that use them”.2

Middleware is a well-established field of development internationally. A range of centres are operating as part of large-scale programmes with a national scope, e.g.

• Identity and access management: authentication, authorisation and access control, federation; and

• Grid services: data (storage, transfer and synchronisation) and computational (resource scheduling, monitoring and management).

http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~eresearch/papers/eResearchMiddleware.pdf

MAPS also notes that the Liberty Alliance – a consortium with more than 150
organizations like Sun, Novell, IBM, RSA, Verisign and Ping Identity - actively promotes the usage of SAML.3

Two other areas of importance when considering identity and access management are:

you are trying to access encrypts a message using your public key. The only way to decrypt the

message is by using your private key, so you prove that you are who you say you are by sending back

5 Metadata Access Management System (MAMS). 2005. Mini-Grant Application Package for joining the MAMS Testbed Federation. https://mams.melcoe.mq.edu.au/zope/mams/events/MiniGrantApplicationInvitation_final.pdf/view.

• Portals, single sign on, account self-service and CAUDIT PKI initiatives are all in development at a small number of organisations.

• Most organisations found the experience of deploying and supporting identity management systems as average (as expected) or difficult.

6 Council of Australian University Directors of IT (CAUDIT). 2006. CIO's Set Top 10 Issues for 2006. http://www.caudit.edu.au/member_notices/index.html#annualMeeting.

UK: Around 20 early adopters of Shibboleth (institutions and consortia) are funded by JISC’s Core Middleware Infrastructure programme
(http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_cminfrastructure.aspx) to “assist them in exploring the adoption of Shibboleth-based technologies”: funding of up to £50,000 was available for deployments, as well as “work on the necessary cultural change and administrative issues that accompany such a move”.8JISC is also financially supporting national data centres in efforts to ‘shibbolise’ their resources (i.e. to enable them to be Shibboleth service providers), and providing support via the Middleware Assisted Take Up service (discussed previously in the section on workforce
development).

The UK e-Science Certification Authority issues certificates for the UK e-Science community (https://ca.grid-support.ac.uk/) and authenticates users via a wide network of Registration Authorities (RAs).

http://www.aarnet.edu.au/engineering/middleware/id_access_mgt_survey.html
8 Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). December 2004. JISC Circular 11/04. Core Middleware: Early Adopters – Call for Proposals. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/11-04FullText.doc.

With regards to certification, BeSTGRID is undertaking activities in this area and is focusing on Australasian efforts rather than local initiatives. BeSTGRID is now an APAC certificate authority for PKI and can ‘sign’ certificates in NZ: while these certificates are not recognised by all applications, they are widely recognised for grid services in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. CAUDIT are also investigating certificate provision for other applications e.g. a Verisign equivalent for Microsoft applications.

The Grid is a computing architecture that supports distributed collaboration by enabling the sharing of “computing power, databases, and other on-line tools securely across corporate, institutional, and geographic boundaries without sacrificing local autonomy.”9 The role of grid middleware is “to get the applications to run on the right computers, wherever they may be on the Grid, in an efficient and reliable way... to organize and integrate the disparate computational resources of the Grid into a coherent whole.”10

As with the area of identity management, de facto standards and best practice are converging through organisations like Open Grid Forum (http://www.ogf.org/) and Globus Alliance (http://www.globus.org), frameworks like the Open Grid Services Architecture (http://www.globus.org/ogsa/) and technologies such as the Globus Toolkit (http://www.globus.org/toolkit/) and Condor (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/).

• TeraGrid (http://www.teragrid.org) provides access to 100+ discipline-specific databases as well as distributed high-performance computers and experimental facilities around the country. TeraGrid is coordinated through the Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG) at the University of Chicago, and partner sites include eight other universities, laboratories, advanced computing centres and research organisations.

• UK National Grid Service (http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/) provides standardised access to compute resources, data resources and large scale facilities, as well as training and support services.

• Grid Canada (http://www.gridcanada.ca/), a collaboration between CANARIE, the Canadian National Research Council (NRC) and C3A, the Canadian High Performance Computing Laboratory. This is at an early stage and infrastructure is still being built.

• GridX1 (http://www.gridx1.ca/) is a smaller-scale collaborative project between Canadian universities and the NRC.

• VUW’s operation of two grids – one ~200-node grid managed using Sun GridEngine and one ~1200-node grid managed using Condor - with plans in future to manage both grids using Condor to further support a small group of users in astronomy, statistics and physics.

BeSTGRID and other exemplar projects are urgently required in New Zealand to demonstrate the value of grid middleware in connecting users with distributed
resources. Another valuable initiative would be the creation of a testbed. In the UK, the need for a testbed grid infrastructure was identified by the e-science community at a 2004 workshop on education and training. A testbed would need to be as similar as possible to the production systems in use, but resources need to be guaranteed for the training sessions; a testbed would also need to have “associated staff expertise”.11

• Establish a testbed infrastructure.

Encourage knowledge transfer from BeSTGRID consortium to other •
KAREN members.

Collaboration: Voice Over IP

Voice over IP (or VoIP, IP telephony, Internet telephony) refers to voice data over the Internet or other IP network. The main driver for VoIP is cost reduction, and many organisations are switching to VoIP when traditional PABX systems reach the end of their life as upgrading the existing systems can cost more than shifting to VOIP. Some organisations are choosing hybrid VoIP/PABX systems. In-house VoIP solutions are offered by a number of large telecommunications and network providers (e.g. Cisco). In recent years free online services such as Skype, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger and have also become popular. These tend to integrate VoIP with other tools such as internet chat, instant messaging and videoconferencing.

Collaboration: Video over IP and advanced conferencing

• Although a wide range of options is available, there seems to be a trend away from open-source products like the Access Grid towards more commercial or semi- commercial (though in some cases, open standards-based) tools like InSORS and Microsoft Conference XP. The Access Grid is still widely used within universities though.

• Both IP and ISDN are widely used: support for both is the norm as both are expected to grow.

• Interoperability is a problem. As well as the issues noted above – open source vs.

commercial, IP vs. ISDN, multipoint/multicast vs. point-to-point – there is a lack of stability with regard to protocols even within video over IP. The most common protocol is ITU H.323 (the same applies to Voice over IP) however the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has developed the competing SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). In the long term SIP may replace H.323, but in the meantime dual protocol support may be required. Organisations may need to operate via multipoint
conference units (MCUs). This is not ideal though, as use of an MCU reduces the videoconference to the lowest common denominator. Bridging may also be needed between the Access Grid and standard H.323 videoconferencing, and even between different versions of AG.

• The majority of respondents thought the quality was excellent (35%) or good (44%), but 5% of sessions were abandoned.

• Users averaged 3 sessions a month and node operators reported usage of around 4 sessions a week at their organisation.