Great Plains Network Consortium

GPN Extending the Reach Project Accomplishments and Publications

Regional Middleware Infrastructure

The Great Plains Network (GPN) is a regional consortium of public universities in the states of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and South Dakota and regional higher education state networks in these states. Its partners include its predecessor, MIDnet. The long-term goal of GPN was and continues to be to build a regional middleware infrastructure to share resources across the region. In June, 2004, GPN was selected to one of four projects to be funded to Extend the Reach of core middleware. The goals and results of the ETR-funded portion of these efforts is described in the initial GPN ETR proposal, two case studies, and in many other presentations and documents available from this web site.

Proposal and Case Studies

  • "Building the Regional Middleware Infrastructure across the Great Plains," Proposal to the Educause ETR Solicitation, May, 2004. Available here.

  • "Great Plains Network: Building the Regional Middleware Infrastructure," GPN Consortium, NMI-EDIT Identity and Access Management Case Study Series, January, 2006. Available here.

  • "Great Plains Network: Integrating Shibboleth, Grid, and Bioinformatics," University of Missouri, NMI-EDIT Identity and Access Management Case Study Series, January, 2006. Available here.

2005 GPN-MIDnet Annual Conference- Lighting the Path Across the Great Plains: Networking, Middleware & Grid Computing

    The GPN ETR Project was a key financial supporter of the 2005 GPN-MIDnet Annual Conference, June 8-10, 2005, in Kansas City. The conference was a resounding success. Over 125 people attended to hear nationally recognized experts on Middleware, Grid Computing and Networking. Presentations are available on the conference website.

Presentations and Publications

  • "Emerging Grid Standards," Mark Baker, Amy Apon, Clayton Ferner, and Jeff Brown, Computer, vol. 38, no. 4, 2005, pp. 43-50. Available at IEEE Distributed Systems Online, here.
  • "Introduction to Shibboleth," Amy Apon, Kurt Landrus, Acxiom Laboratory for Applied Research (ALAR) 2005 Conference on Applied Research in Information Technology. February, 2005. Available here.
  • "Identity Management Infrastructure at The University of Kansas," Kathryn Huxtable, GPN ETR Group Presentation, March, 2005. Available here.
  • "Short Introduction to Shibboleth," Amy Apon, GPN ETR Group Presentation, August, 2004. Available here.
  • GPN Slides from the Educause ETR Kickoff Meeting, Amy Apon, June, 2004, Interlocken, CO. Available here.

Project Presentations at the GPN ETR Data Repository Site http://beagle.rnet.missouri.edu/GPN/Docs/

Application Development

In addition to the building of regional middleware infrastructure at participating campuses, the GPN ETR Project has funded application development in several areas:

Integrating Shibboleth, Grid and Bioinformatics

This development project focused on building a Shibboleth application environment that integrates bioinformatics tools to support researchers in a shared virtual organization collaboration environment. This involved the development of a generalized mechanism for non-Shibboleth aware web applications to take advantage of the Shibboleth authenticated environment. Bioinformatics web applications can use Shibboleth for authentication and NMI-EDIT middleware (Internet2 MACE and eduPerson object class) entitlements for fine-grained authorization to access specific resources and provide services to perform some commonly used genomic tasks, including a genomic database search capability. Three commonly used bioinformatics tools (Clustal W, WWW Blast and MPI Blast) have been Shibbolized without compromising their ability or performance using a set of generic functions for authentication and authorization. One of the tools also employs grid computing technologies to utilize different resources available to the project.

  • "GPN - Region-Wide Collaboration Environment," Gordon K. Springer, Internet2 Presentation, September, 2005. Available here.
  • "Integrating the Pieces - Shibboleth, Entitlements and Grid in a Virtual Organization," Gordon K. Springer, GPN Annual Meeting, June, 2005. Available here.
  • "Extending the Reach. Inter-institutional AuthenticationVia Shibboleth," Gordon K. Springer, GPN ETR Group Presentation, October, 2005. Available here

 

Command-Line Java Client for Shibboleth

Initial versions of Shibboleth use a web browser as the interface with the users in order to guide them through the authentication and authorization process. This prototype Java client tests the opportunity to further simplify the interaction between users and Shibboleth by allowing users to interact with a Shibboleth server without the need of a graphical browser.

 

Shibbolized Subversion

Shibbolized Subversion is motivated by the needs of users to have a robust data sharing system. Subversion is a version control repository structure based on open source utility software. In this project, a Subversion repository with an Apache web interface is protected by the Shibboleth authentication system. This structure allows authorized and authenticated data sharing between institutions while protecting privacy for the users. In addition, it also helps the administrators of the resource location from having to perform extra account management on new users from other institutions.

 

WebMPI

WebMPI is a prototype demonstration of the use of Shibboleth for providing authorization and access control to remote cluster computing resources through a web job submission interface. The design and implementation of the WebMPI web interface to Beowulf cluster resources is described in these documents, along with its use of the Shibboleth system for authentication and authorization of users.

  • "Using Shibboleth to Manage Access Control to Remote Cluster Computing Resources,", Amy Apon, Kurt Landrus, Jens Mache, and Kathryn Huxtable, Proceedings of SC2004, 17th ACM/IEEE High-Performance Computing, Networking and Storage Conference, November, 2004. Available here.
  • "WebMPI - a Secure Cluster Web Interface using ShibbolethWebMPI," Kurt Landrus, M.S. Thesis, University of Arkansas, May, 2005. Available here.
  • M.S. Defense presentation by Kurt Landrus. Available here.

  • Source code for WebMPI.

©2004-2006 University of Arkansas