Terminology used in Globus

From GridInfo

Certificate Authority (CA): an entity which issues digital certificates for use by other parties. It is an example of a trusted third party. CA's are characteristic of many public key infrastructure (PKI) schemes. The primary responsibilities CA are: Positively identify, entities requesting certificates, Issuing, removing, and archiving certificates, Protecting the Certificate Authority server, Maintaining a namespace of unique names for certificate owners, Serve signed certificates to those needing to authenticate entities, Logging activity.

Certificate revocation list (CRL): Since grid computing does not normally store digital certificates within a directory, there is no need for a certificate revocation list (CRL). During the authentication process, grid computers use mutual authentication that performs the digital certificate exchange and does not reference a directory store. For these purposes, the process of revoking grid certificates are handled manually. In other PKI environments that use directory services to store the public key, a CRL is a means of notifying clients who wish to verify the revocation of certificates. CRLs are issued to mark some certificates unusable, even though their expiration has not come yet.

Digital Certificate: Digital certificates are digital documents that associate a grid resource with its specific public key. A certificate is a data structure containing a public key and pertinent details about the key owner. A certificate is considered to be a tamper-proof electronic ID when it signed by the Certification Authority for the grid environment. Digital certificates, also called X.509 certificates, act very much like passports; they provide a means of identifying grid resources.

The Global Grid Forum (GGF): was founded in 2001 when the merger of regional grid organizations created a single worldwide one

Global Access to Secondary Storage (GAAS): is used for file staging and cache management.

The Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI): contains components to secure your grid network.

The Grid Resource Allocation and Management (GRAM): is a means allowing programs to be started on remote resources.

GridFTP: The Grid File Transfer Program provides high-performance and reliant data transfer.

Grid Index Information Service (GIIS):is the database that contains indexes of resource information registered by the GRIS and other GIISs. It can be seen as a grid-wide information server. GIIS has a hierarchical mechanism, like DNS, and each GIIS has its own name. This means client users can specify the name of a GIIS node to search for information.

The Grid Resource Information Service (GRIS): is the repository of local resource information derived from information providers. GRIS is able to register its information with a GIIS, but GRIS itself does not receive registration requests. The local information maintained by GRIS is updated when requested, and cached for a period of time known as the time-to-live (TTL). If no request for the information is received by GRIS, the information will time out and be deleted. If a later request for the information is received, GRIS will call the relevant information provider(s) to retrieve the latest information.

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP):builds on TCP/IP to define a query-response protocol for querying the state of remote databases.

The Monitoring and Discovery System (MDS): is the information services component of the Globus Toolkit and provides information about the available resources on the Grid and their status.

Virtual Organization (VO): A virtual entity whose users and servers are geographically apart but share their resources collectively as a larger grid. The users of the grid can be organized dynamically into a number of virtual organizations, each with different policy requirements.

Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF): is a specification that extends web services for grid applications by giving them the ability to retain state information while at the same time retaining statelessness (using resources). The combination of a web service and a resource is referred to as a WS-Resource. The Web Services Resources Framework is a collection of different specifications that manage WS-Resources. For more information, go to: http://www.globus.org/wsrf/.