The Great Plains Network (GPN) Middleware Test Bed

Abstract

GPN (Great Plains Network) is a consortium of public universities in
seven mid-western states. GPN goals include regional strategic
planning and the development of a collaboration environment,
middleware services and a regional grid for sharing computational,
storage and data resources. A major challenge is to arrive at a
common authentication and authorization service, based on the set of
heterogeneous identity providers at each institution.

GPN has built a prototype middleware test bed that includes Shibboleth
and other NMI-EDIT middleware components. The test bed includes
several prototype end-user applications, and is being used to further
our research into fine-grained access control for virtual
organizations. The GPN prototype applications and namespace form a
basis for the design and deployment of a robust and scalable attribute
management architecture.