A Single Sign-On Infrastructure for Science Gateways on a Use Case for Structural Bioinformatics

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Structural bioinformatics applies computational methods to analyze and model three-dimensional molecular structures. There is a huge number of applications available to work with structural data on large scale. Using these tools on distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs), however, is often complicated due to a lack of suitable interfaces. The MoSGrid (Molecular Simulation Grid) science gateway provides an intuitive user interface to several widely-used applications for structural bioinformatics, molecular modeling, and quantum chemistry. It ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data via a granular security concept, which covers all layers of the infrastructure. The security concept applies SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) and allows trust delegation from the user interface layer across the high-level middleware layer and the Grid middleware layer down to the HPC facilities. SAML assertions had to be integrated into the MoSGrid infrastructure in several places: the workflow-enabled Grid portal WS-PGRADE (Web Services Parallel Grid Runtime and Developer Environment), the gUSE (Grid User Support Environment) DCI services, and the cloud file system XtreemFS. The presented security infrastructure allows a single sign-on process to all involved DCI components and, therefore, lowers the hurdle for users to utilize large HPC infrastructures for structural bioinformatics.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)769-790
Number of pages22
JournalJournal of Grid Computing
Volume10
Issue number4
Publication statusPublished - 2012
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 84871643232
researchoutputwizard legacy.publication#65282

Keywords

Keywords

  • DCIs, Single sign-on, Structural bioinformatics, Science gateway, Security