Federating Identity Management for a Regional HPC Resource

Abstract

The University of Colorado Boulder Research Computing group operates RMACC Summit, a shared regional high-performance computing resource managed jointly by the University of Colorado Boulder and Colorado State University and funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Access to the resource is additionally available to partner institutions in the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium, particularly to institutions without local high-performance computing resources. Users from these institutions would typically be required to acquire an account at the operating institution and then acquire a dedicated account for the resource. Alternatively a dedicated login environment to differentiate between accounts originating from different institutions could be provided. CU Boulder's Research Computing group has obviated these concerns, providing access to a single, uniform Linux login environment that is used simultaneously by CU Boulder, CSU, and partner institutions facilitated by an XSEDE login service. The use of the existing XSEDE identity and access infrastructure allows CU Boulder's Research Computing group to support a pervasively distributed user community on the RMACC Summit supercomputer without requiring formal identity federation with each RMACC partner institution; and encourages wider familiarity with and adoption of XSEDE in the RMACC user community.