title: Globus Nexus: A Platform-as-a-Service Provider of Research Identity, Profile, and Group Management.
abstract: Globus Nexus is a professionally hosted Platform-as-a-Service that provides identity, profile and group management functionality for the research community. Many collaborative e-Science applications need to manage large numbers of user identities, profiles, and groups. However, developing and maintaining such capabilities is often challenging given the complexity of modern security protocols and requirements for scalable, robust, and highly available implementations. By outsourcing this functionality to Globus Nexus, developers can leverage best-practice implementations without incurring development and operations overhead. Users benefit from enhanced capabilities such as identity federation, flexible profile management, and user-oriented group management. In this paper we present Globus Nexus, describe its capabilities and architecture, summarize how several e-Science applications leverage these capabilities, and present results that characterize its scalability, reliability, and availability.
authors.affiliation: Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Kyle
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Chard
authors.affiliation: Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Mattias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lidman
authors.affiliation: Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Brendan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: McCollam
authors.affiliation: Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Josh
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bryan
authors.affiliation: Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Rachana
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ananthakrishnan
authors.affiliation: Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Steven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tuecke
authors.affiliation: Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL, USA ; Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA ; Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Ian
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Foster
keywords: Globus Nexus; Platform-as-a-Service; group management; identity federation; identity management