XOS-SSH: A Lightweight User-Centric Tool to Support Remote Execution in Virtual Organizations

Large-scale virtual organizations (VOs) often comprise resource providers from different administrative domains, each probably with a specific security model. Grids try to solve this problem by providing a new security infrastructure featured with single-sign on (SSO). However, the usability of Grids is often impaired by the complicity of configuring and maintaining the new security infrastructure as well as adapting to new interfaces of security enabled services. The co-existing of different Grid platforms and SSO solutions among resource providers makes this situation even worse. In this paper, we present XOS-SSH, a lightweight user-centric tool to support remote execution of jobs among heterogeneous nodes of VOs. XOS-SSH is a modified version of the widely used OpenSSH tool based on several OS-level VO support mechanisms developed in XtreemOS project [21]. XOS-SSH adopts a pluggable framework that is capable of supporting different authentication schemes and making them transparent to shell users. The performance evaluation of XOS-SSH around NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) shows that our current implementation incurs trivial overhead comparing to the unmodified one.