Globus Nexus: A Platform-as-a-Service provider of research identity, profile, and group management

Journal Article · Tue Mar 01 00:00:00 EST 2016 · Future Generations Computer Systems

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2015.09.006· OSTI ID:1393159

Chard, Kyle ; Lidman, Mattias; McCollam, Brendan; Bryan, Josh; Ananthakrishnan, Rachana; Tuecke, Steven; Foster, Ian

Globus Nexus is a professionally hosted Platform-as-a-Service that provides identity, profile and group management functionality for the research community. Many collaborative e-Science applications need to manage large numbers of user identities, profiles, and groups. However, developing and maintaining such capabilities is often challenging given the complexity of modern security protocols and requirements for scalable, robust, and highly available implementations. By outsourcing this functionality to Globus Nexus, developers can leverage best-practice implementations without incurring development and operations overhead. Users benefit from enhanced capabilities such as identity federation, flexible profile management, and user-oriented group management. In this paper we present Globus Nexus, describe its capabilities and architecture, summarize how several e-Science applications leverage these capabilities, and present results that characterize its scalability, reliability, and availability.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: National Institutes of Health (NIH); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES)
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-06CH11357
• OSTI ID: 1393159
• Journal Information: Future Generations Computer Systems, Vol. 56; ISSN 0167-739X
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

Globus Nexus
Platform-as-a-Service
group management
identity federation
identity management