Identity and Authentication

The Africa-Arabia ROC operates a federation of resources across several institutes. Access to them requires a global identity. While you may have a single user aIn order to execute applications and store data on the grid, you'll need a context . This is provided through an identity provider and an authorisation :

• Identity or Authentication is provided by a personal X.509 digital certificate issued to you by a recognosed Certificate Authority . Identities provided by federated identity providers are also accepted by certain services.
• Permissions or Authorisation are generally provided by your role in a Virtual Organisation but can also be determined on a service-by-service basis.

Getting Started

In order to provide transparent access to these, we allow central registration via the Perun service. If you're a new user, and you'd like to start using the grid, sign up to the Catch-All VO for the region. This will give you access to the user interfaces, and identify you to various services.

Middleware

Maintaining interoperability between the various sites requires a special layer of software called Middleware . Middleware makes the distributed and complicated nature of a distributed infrastructure like AfricaGrid transparent to users and applications. User interaction with the middelware is usually done rarely, on command-line based user interfaces, and is enturely hidden with the use of Science Gateways.The Unified Middleware Distribution packages the middleware components of several providers (ARC, dCache, gLite and Globus)