A new Grid federation is helping scientists around the world to access computers and information in more than 50 countries and regions simply, securely and easily. The International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF) was established at the 15th Global Grid Forum meeting held in Boston in October 2005, and will bring together organizations representing Asia, the Americas and Europe - from Canada to China and from Portugal to Pakistan. Members provide systems allowing scientists to identify themselves to any Grid resource in the world with just a single online identity in the form of a digital certificate.
"Reliably identifying Grid users and their work is critical to the success of Grid computing across the world," explained Neil Geddes, director of e-science at the CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. "The formation of the IGTF is a huge step forward in agreeing mechanisms whereby users of one Grid can seamlessly become users of all Grids, thereby unlocking the full potential of Grid computing worldwide."
IGTF is a federation of three "policy management authorities", one covering the EU and beyond (www.eugridpma.org), one for the Americas (www.tagpma.org) and one for Asia-Pacific (www.apgridpma.org). Individual members are national certification authorities which issue digital certificates to scientists to enable them to use the Grid, international Grid collaborations which rely on the authorities for authenticating their scientists, and major infrastructure providers which rely on certificates for protecting their resources. These resources include more than 40,000 computer processors and several petabytes of storage - equivalent to millions of DVDs. The federation today has 61 members and covers 50 countries and regions.
• For more on authentication see (see CERN Courier January/February 2005 p21).
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Compiled by Hannelore Hämmerle and Nicole Crémel