Since 2004, the High-Performance Computing (HPC) community has organized
itself in Europe through two major EU funded projects : DEISA (Distributed
European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, 2004-20011) and
PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) which started in 2008.
The HPC ecosystem has been consolidated with the definition of a “pyramidal
model” which clarifies the relations between the different actors. This work
led to the creation in 2010 of PRACE-RI, a persistent pan-European
infrastructure with its headquarter seated in Brussels and established as a
non-profit association of European government representative organizations
responsible for HPC.
Identity management has always been considered as a critical activity and it
has been a constant goal to maintain a robust solution both secured and not
discouraging for the end users. For this reason, technical teams have done
their best to design and implement a robust and easy-to-use solution. The
trust model adopted is based on X509 certificates and uses when possible the
Single Sign-On (SSO) approach. A fine grained authorization system as well
as a distributed accounting database are also included.
Even if the current model is fully operational, PRACE is investigating how it
could evolve to integrate identity federation solutions. The main reason
motivating this approach is a strong wish to enable interoperability with
other international projects. Therefore, PRACE follows closely as part of its
technology evaluation program the efforts carried out in this field. Following open standards based solutions is essential to reach interoperability, however there are also other criteria that must not be forgotten such as the identification of trustful credential providers, common
understanding of the meaning of attributes and the compliance of
applications with the solutions.