iSGTW 29 November 2006

Home > iSGTW 29 November 2006

Issue 3: iSGTW 29 November 2006

Feature: Studying Grid Society

Social scientists are using grids for their research without ever submitting a job. They study grid technologies and grid communities, and how both develop and interact with each other.

“I think it’s interesting to elicit the social elements behind technologies like the grid, and to make sense of technologies in social settings,” says one such social scientist, Will Venters from the London School of Economics.

Feature - Applications

Digital Libraries Go Dynamic
What’s digital, can manage any information you might have, but doesn’t exist until you ask for it? Digital libraries, according to Pasquale Pagano from the Digital Library Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technologies project.

Feature - Profile

The Portal Provider
Eric Roberts knows portals. As a staff member at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, he has spent the last five years developing, testing, redeveloping and refining them – first as a member and project manager of the GridPort toolkit team, and now as lead developer for the TeraGrid User Portal.

Acronym of the Week

GUMS
GUMS, which stands for Grid User Management System, is a grid identity mapping service. Identity mapping is necessary when a grid site’s resources do not use grid credentials but instead use a different mechanism to identify users, such as UNIX accounts or Kerberos principals. In these cases, the grid credential for each incoming computing job must be associated with an appropriate site credential. The GUMS server performs this mapping and communicates it to the gatekeepers.