SUMMARYGrid technology and ICT-based infrastructures play a crucial role in the development of transnational multi-disciplinary collaborations and allow scientists to share a wide range of distributed computational resources, regardless of their geographical location, and address new global scientific challenges. Till now, the strict security policy requested in order to access distributed computing resources has been a limiting factor when trying to broaden the adoption of Grids by wide communities of users. There is a steep learning curve to climb before starting to gain some benefits from this new technology. Grid security is indeed based on the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) of X.509 certificate although the procedure to get and manage those certificates is unfortunately not straightforward. A first step to make Grids more appealing for new users has recently been achieved with the adoption of robot certificates. In this paper, the solution proposed by the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics to go through the complexity of Grid security and allow bioinformaticians to perform large-scale Bayesian Phylogenetic analyses on the Grid by means of a web portal enabled by a robot certificate is presented.
The elements of the GILDA dissemination grid developed within the context of Italian INFN Grid Project and the European EGEE Project are presented and described.
Background: Grid technology is the computing model which allows users to share a wide pletora of distributed computational resources regardless of their geographical location. Up to now, the high security policy requested in order to access distributed computing resources has been a rather big limiting factor when trying to broaden the usage of Grids into a wide community of users. Grid security is indeed based on the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) of X.509 certificates and the procedure to get and manage those certificates is unfortunately not straightforward. A first step to make Grids more appealing for new users has recently been achieved with the adoption of robot certificates.
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