GT 4.0 Tech Preview: Dynamic Accounts

Overview

This component is a technical preview (commonly referred to as tech preview) for the GT 4.0 final distribution. As such, this documentation is not part of the GT 4.0 official documentation but is provided by the developer(s) to assist early adopters. This component also has very limited support.

	Note
	This component's name has been updated from Workspace Management Services (WMS) to Dynamic Accounts.

Dynamic Accounts allows a Grid client to dynamically create and manage a workspace, currently implemented as a Unix account, on a remote site. The infrastructure is composed of a factory service that allows an authorized Grid client to create individual accounts or groups of accounts, and an account service that allows an authorized Grid client to manage individual account properties, such as account access policy or time to live (TTL). These concepts are represented as WSRF services and implemented using the GT4 implementation of WSRF.

The Dynamic Accounts code consists of a front-end that implements protocols for the creation and management of workspaces and a back-end implementation. Dynamic Accounts creation and management can be implemented in different ways according to site policies and preferences. At this point, our implementation supports two such "back-ends": (1) true dynamic creation using the Unix adduser command, and (2) an account pooling implementation based on Andrew McNab's gridmapdir patch and the gLite LCMAPS system.

You can find documentation for Dynamic Accounts here.