Streamlining Grid Operations: Definition and Deployment of a Portal-based User Registration Service

Manual management of public key credentials can be a significant and often off-putting obstacle to Grid use, particularly for casual users. We describe the Portal-based User Registration Service (PURSE), a set of tools for automating user registration, credential creation, and credential management tasks. PURSE provides the system developer with a set of customizable components, suitable for integration with portals, that can be used to address the full lifecycle of Grid credential management. We describe the PURSE design and its use in portals for two systems, the Earth System Grid data access system and the Swegrid computational Grid. In both cases, the user is entirely freed from the need to create or manage public key credentials, thus simplifying the Grid experience and reducing opportunities for error. We argue that this capturing of common use cases in a reusable ‘solution’ can be a model for how Grid ease-of-use can be addressed in other domains as well.