Babu Sundaram

As part of my Ph.D. dissertation, I have been focussing more on the authentication mechanisms for grids. My ultimate aim is to come up with an easy-to-use and powerful authentication system. As a first step, I have worked upon adding credential revocation support in existing grid security solutions (GSI of the Globus toolkit). This work is to appear in the proceedings of Grid computing Workshop, November 2005 (Seattle) and 12th IEEE International High Performance Computing Conference, December 2005(Goa, India). Currently, I am working on mechanisms to identify compromised credentials in a PKI setting and also on formal methods to prove the correctness and validity of grid security protocols and cryptosystems.

Gladly, I am one of the winners of 2005 Summer of Code competition organized by Google. I am very happy to have proposed a project to develop a package for a grid-related software (Grid Engine) as part of the Open Source Cluster Application Resource (OSCAR) initiative. I have put up a separate page for information about the current status of this work. Though this project's main focus is on implementation, I still put here in research because it involved some in deciding on a package organization and that requires you to have a decent knowledge on the software that you are developing the package for and a basic sysadmin mind ;-) If you have never been exposed to open source development, I suggest you to give it a try. Its really cool to be a part of a team and write software thats demanded by people in your research area. Also, you get to learn new technologies that way.

My recent work is also related with web services and their role in Grid computing. Primarily, this means experimenting with Globus toolkit 4 (GT4), developing WSRF-compliant services. We are working on including WSRF support in EZ-Grid portal services. You can also find a write-up here that I prepared about compliance with OGSI and will evolve this as to address WSRF as our work progresses. The writeup is very dated and there are much better documents on this topic available elsewhere. I am making it available just for archival purposes.

Together with Dr. Chapman, I am currently co-ordinating and involved in the EZ-Grid portal project. More detailed information can be found at the exclusive project page. My work on Policy Engine has been published in the proceedings of both Grid Computing 2001 and 2002. Currently, we are involved in developing a portal for this EZ-Grid services.

I was also involved with developing a policy specification and evaluation mechanism for Globus, a very popular middleware tool for Grid computing. We analyzed Classified Advertisements, a product of Condor Project from University of Wisconsin as a mechanism to express and evaluate resource usage policies. This work was during my summer internship at Argonne National labs, operated by the University of Chicago for the Department of Energy. This work was selected as a research gem for the Super computing conference, November 2000. You can also see the presentation on the policy work.