Tuskegee Grid School
Tuskegee, Alabama
February 6-8, 2008

Open Grid Forum
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February 25-29, 2008

All Hands OSG Consortium Meeting
Renaissance Computing Institute, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
March 3-7, 2008

PRAGMA14 (More Information)
March 11-12, 2008
Taichung, Taiwan

International Symposium on Grid Computing
Taipei, Taiwan
April 7-11, 2008

Members of the thee regional policy management authorities, the Asia Pacific Grid PMA, the European Grid PMA and The Americas Grid PMA, met at Nikhef January 14-16. Image courtesy David Groep, NIKHEF. Click for larger image

Together with Mike Helm, who runs the DOEGrids CA that many OSG users and resource owners get their certificates from, I attended the recent EUGridPMA meeting, where we were told about the results of audits of a number of CAs.

Mike reported on an extensive internal audit of the DOEGrids CA performed last fall which culminated in a day-long event with five auditors examining the practices and compliance of DOEGrids. Since I run the OSG registration authority, this was a useful meeting for me to attend.

One important issue for OSG is that our identity vetting process does not require face-to-face presentation of a photo ID. Most EUGridPMA accredited CAs do.

I gave a presentation about U.S. procedures for scientists to apply for remote access to our computing facilities, where people known as "agents" who are well known to the facility operators approve access to members of their project, who are usually not well-known by the facility operators. This is handled by secure remote communications.

There was agreement that this type of identity vetting model should be described and included in the profile description by which CAs are accredited by the EU as well as US. I will be helping develop a common description to be included in the approved profile document.

~ Doug Olson

Ruth Pordes

The BEVO site gives you a web cast of all the talks and plenary discussions.

It was really useful to explore different views of what VOs are, are not, and could be. OSG input about why a VO is not an “O,” for your consideration: a VO delegates establishing the identity of each person through “Os”. Also, VO delegates to “Os” the purchase and identity of physical hardware.

Thank you Brad, Jim, Lothar, Patrick and Ana, for coming to Washington to offer testimonials about your scientific use of the OSG to the external review panel. Thank you to all the OSG area coordinators who worked so hard to prepare the material and presentations. Thank you to the reviewers for their comments and discussions and for responding especially well to the results of our engagement and education efforts that John presented.

Now at CERN, we face the reality of the Common Computing Readiness Challenge 2008 while having thinking time with our EGEE colleagues on technology and architectures for now and for the future: A lot of security issues at the joint security policy group and plans for changes to the EGEE end-to-end authorization infrastructures; operations issues related to site functional testing and availability calculations, our federated interoperation testbeds, and storage services deployments for the data part of our infrastucture.

Finally, please upgrade your resource to OSG 0.8.0 and continue to accept jobs and data from OSG VOs ! This collaboration -- sharing and working together -- is what makes us unique.

~Ruth