Grid computingHPDC to publish best grid computing cybersecurity papers

Published 9 April 2012

In the late 1990s, as science was pushing new limits in terms of levels of computation and data and in the collaboration between scientists across universities, countries, and the globe, grid computing emerged as the model to support such large scientific collaborations by providing their computational resources and the structure behind them

A research paper co-authored by Von Welch, deputy director of the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, has been named one of the top twenty papers in the past twenty years of publications from the International ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC).

Published in 2003, “Security for Grid Services” put forth a security architecture for grid computing and described its application in the Globus Toolkit, the leading implementation of grid computing at the time. An Indiana University release reports that in the late 1990s, as science was pushing new limits in terms of levels of computation and data and in the collaboration between scientists across universities, countries, and the globe, grid computing emerged as the model to support such large scientific collaborations by providing their computational resources and the structure behind them. The model proposed in the paper continues to impact security in these collaborations today.

Security for Grid Services” was nominated by members of the High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing community-at-large. A committee then refined submissions and narrowed the field to the best twenty. A special edition issue containing the twenty papers will be distributed at the HPDC’s 2012 meeting, to be held this summer in the Netherlands.

Welch has been deputy director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research since early 2011. He specializes in cybersecurity for distributed systems, particularly scientific collaborations and federated identity. He has worked with a range of high-visibility projects, including TeraGrid, Open Science Grid, Ocean Observatory Infrastructure, and GENI, to provide usable cybersecurity to the broader scientific and engineering community.

Most recently, Welch has served on the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for CyberInfrastructure Task Force on Campus Bridging and founded the Identity Management Research Cyberinfrastructure group of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation.

— Read more in Von Welch et al., “Security for Grid Services