UC-cern-user
From EGI Knowledge Base
Use Case title: Guide novice users to the Grid
Short description: Today’s procedure, from the request for a personal digital certificate up to data retrieval from a site is too complex. The chain Authentication – Authorisation – Job submission – access to results needs to be simplified. Integration of new communities to the Grid has to become faster and easier. Already within existing VOs, a lot of effort is spent to train new users, despite the experience available in their environment. Today, Grid usage is reserved to computing ‘experts’. This is not a good forecast for funding.
Actors involved: Grid architects, Middleware designers and developers, User supporters.
Related Requirement: Users who don’t belong to large communities but need to use the Grid cannot today unless they register a new VO. This situation doesn’t scale and certainly will never make the Grid as popular as the Web.
Pre-conditions: (optional) Important middleware re-design effort needs to be invested. Security policies must be re-thought in a, still secure, yet more flexible way.
Steps: The actual steps required, so that the use case can be materialised.
- The Joint Security Policy Group to revise policies in the light of a large Grid community.
- Simplify or abandon certificate-based authentication for users and hosts.
- The middleware security group, which includes policy makers and developers, to review the Authentication and Authorisation procedures and tools.
- The VO Registration Procedures, VO Management and User responsibilities to be re-defined.
- Grid Storage and Data Management experts to re-design their code in the new ‘plug-and-play’ spirit.
Post-conditions (optional): Audit, monitoring and security update procedures should be well established and scrupulously applied for the Grid to be more easily accessible but remain secure.
Project(s) involved (optional): All special-purpose projects under the gLite software umbrella. Security experts, CAs and commercial partners from the computer industry, databases and, even, mobile telephony projects can be foreseen for the era, when Grid usage becomes really easy.
Middleware (optional): Integration to the Grid environment or replacement of certificate signing and renewal for hosts and humans. All middleware packages, especially VOMS/VOMRS, UIs, RBs, SEs.
Application(s) (optional): All information dissemination tools; documentation, software repositories, web pages, newsletters, registration forms, multiple purpose portals.
