Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
CASE STUDY CLOSE UP
The Morgridge Institute for Research is a private, nonprofit biomedical research institute in Madison, Wisconsin, affiliated with the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The institute contracted with InCommon Catalyst CILogon, a non-profit based at the University of Illinois to provide a hosted COmanage Registry for the Open Science Grid (OSG) Consortium.
OSG Consortium is a distributed high throughput computing (dHTC) organization that manages access to a global network of data and computing resources shared across more than 70 institutions. The consortium worked with CILogon to implement a user registry to facilitate distributed onboarding, offboarding, and authorization workflows delegated to volunteer administrators across the globe.
With nearly 200 research projects and growing, the project needed to be scalable without demanding significant staff time. Leveraging CILogon’s established services in the InCommon Federation, the OSG Consortium outsourced the credentialing and authentication tasks to researchers’ home institutions and focused solely on the authorization workflows to ensure the right researchers have access to their projects in a timely manner. (Read the case study.)
“As an all-volunteer ‘coalition of the willing’ in a community of researchers–not IT administrators–we could not afford to run a help desk. CILogon’s COmanage registry achieved the scalability we needed by offloading authentication to established systems. This allowed OSG Consortium staff to delegate authorization decisions to administrators with knowledge and responsibility for specific projects.”
Brian Bockelman
Research Computing Investigator for Morgridge Institute
CILogon’s services enabled streamlined and scalable authentication, authorization, and connectivity to support efficient access to the OSG Consortium’s research systems. More than 400 active members are currently registered in the CILogon COmanage registry, primarily authenticating via the InCommon Federation. OSG staff are not burdened by managing usernames and passwords, and system users do not need to track another set of credentials. This approach addresses user, administrator, efficiency, and security needs.
To learn more about this effort, read the full case study.
About CI Logon
CILogon, a nonprofit subscription service from the University of Illinois, enables researchers and scholars to log on to cyberinfrastructure (CI). CILogon provides an open-source IAM platform for research and scholarship collaborations that combines federated identity management (Shibboleth) with collaborative organization management (COmanage Registry), directory services (OpenLDAP), OIDC/SAML proxy services (SATOSA), SAML Metadata Query services (pyFF), and capability-based authorization (SciTokens). CILogon follows REFEDS standards (Assurance, MFA, R&S, SIRTFI, voPerson).
About The OSG Consortium
Established in 2005, the OSG Consortium operates a fabric of distributed High Throughput Computing (dHTC) services in support of the national science and engineering community. The research collaborations, campuses, national laboratories, and software providers that form the consortium are unified in their commitment to advance open science via these services.
About the InCommon Catalyst Program
The InCommon Catalyst Program, launched in June 2021, assists higher education institutions, research organizations, and sponsored partners in their efforts to enable better security, access to services, and user experience through InCommon’s integrated service and software solutions. A group of industry leaders and Internet2 members that actively contribute to IAM within the R&E community, InCommon Catalysts offer a wide range of IAM support services. If you’re interested in leveraging the experience and expertise of an InCommon Catalyst to solve a particular challenge or devise a roadmap for a full IAM reboot, feel free to reach out directly.