The University of Virginia Campus Grid: Integrating Grid Technologies with the Campus Information Infrastructure

Grid software often unfortunately requires significant changes in existing infrastructure, both in terms of policy and mechanism, instead of accommodating and leveraging existing information servers such as enterprise LDAP servers and enterprise authentication infrastructures. The University of Virginia Campus Grid (UVaCG) has been designed explicitly to re-use as much existing infrastructure in the campus environment as possible in creating a Grid based on the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF), specifically the Globus Toolkit v4 and WSRF.NET. We report on the design and the current status of the UVaCG, with particular emphasis on the challenge of creating explicit policy expression, negotiation, and enforcement. When fully operational, campus researchers will be able to seamlessly utilize resources within the campus enterprise and expand on-demand to larger Grids such as the TeraGrid and the Open Science Grid.