Dan on eScience & Technical Computing @ Microsoft : Grid

SecPAL v1.1 Now Available

Dan Fay — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 10:33:17 GMT

Just got a note from Jason that SecPAL 1.1 is available - this is great - take a look at the codeplex site for more details - Jason/Blair and team, you're doing great things...let's see if the community recognize what you've been up to...

Summary of New Features in the SecPAL Research Release v1.1

SecPAL v1.1 is a minor release of SecPAL that maintains compability with our first reasearch release of SecPAL. Changes for v1.1 include:
New / Upgraded Features

We have updated the SecPAL grammar to a new and much more readable grammar. I will post a longer explanation in the coming weeks, but in short when you read a SecPAL policy conditions will now be prefaced by an "IF" statement, and constriaints will now be prefaced by a "WHERE" statement. These changes along with improved readibility of fact qualifiers should make the English representation of your policies / assertions much simpler to read. Note: This change should have no impact on existing policies, as it only affects the output of policies / tokens when you call .ToString() on them.
The 'CanActAs' predicate can now be used as a conditional fact within an assertion.
No breaking changes were made to API's so any SecPAL dependent code that you have written should behave the same.

SecPAL v1.1 Now Available

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we have just released a minor update to our SecPAL library. In addition to a couple of minor bug fixes there are two features which I think you are really going to like. The first is an update to our grammar - making it much clearer what conditions and constraints are. The second (which was actually a bug fix) is that our graphical proof graphs now work.

Source: The Hogg Blog : SecPAL v1.1 Now Available

LinuxInsider: Security: Microsoft Invites Collaboration With Grid Computing Research

Dan Fay — Wed, 02 May 2007 00:25:34 GMT

Article on SecPAL from LinuxInsider...

Microsoft Invites Collaboration With Grid Computing Research

Microsoft's Security Policy Assertion Language, or SecPAL, is the company's attempt to develop a language for expressing decentralized authorization policies. The software firm hopes that making available the implementation and design information from its SecPAL project will encourage the security and grid research communities to test and experiment with it.

Source: Linux News: Security: Microsoft Invites Collaboration With Grid Computing Research

SecPAL Preview Release for Microsoft .NET

Dan Fay — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 20:30:03 GMT

Grid folks and security researchers should be interested in the SecPAL preview release - The goal of the SecPAL project is to develop a language for expressing decentralized authorization policies, and to investigate language design and semantics, as well as related algorithms and analysis techniques.

SecPAL Preview Release for Microsoft .NET
The Security Policy Assertion Language (SecPAL) provides a flexible and robust declarative authorization language developed for large-scale Grid Computing Environments. This installable MSI includes a preview release of the .NET implementation of SecPAL, developer document describing the SecPAL programming model and scenario based samples intended to support evaluation of SecPAL.

Source: SecPAL Preview Release for Microsoft .NET

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Your PCs forecast climate future

Dan Fay — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:01:35 GMT

It's great to see the climateprediction.net folks getting fantastic uptake on the community computation simulation - over 250,000 users...as a sponsor of the effort, it's great to see those idle cycles going to good use.

Your PCs forecast climate future
Climateprediction.net uses the power of thousands of ordinary PCs
A computer model of climate run on home PCs in conjunction with the BBC has yielded its first results.
About 250,000 people downloaded software from climateprediction.net onto their home computers, each running a single simulation of the future.
The results suggest the UK could be about 3C warmer than now in 75 years' time, agreeing with other models.
Full details will be revealed at the weekend in a BBC TV programme presented by Sir David Attenborough.

Source: BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Your PCs forecast climate future

Mundie: Science as a Web Service

Dan Fay — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 01:47:23 GMT

I realized I forgot to post about Craig Mundie's article in the March/April Technology Review -

Science as a Web Service

XML can supercharge research.
<...>
XML is also one of the enabling technologies for grid computing and Web services, which will revolutionize the scientific community in the coming decade by enabling the free exchange of information across distributed systems. Remote computation will be directly accessible from any desktop, and sensors and instruments will have their own Internet addresses.
The immediate challenge for the scientific and engineering community is to take advantage of available data management and data analysis tools. The larger and longer-term challenge is for the leaders in academic research to leverage software and Web services technologies to standardize the way they present and track their data.

Shibboleth and ADFS Interoperability – this is now a reality!

Dan Fay — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 23:43:28 GMT

Glad to see this use fo the Shibboleth ADFS Integration: An extension allowing a Shibboleth 1.3 IdP to integrate with Microsoft's Active Directory Federation Service.

Shibboleth and ADFS Interoperability – this is now a reality!

Last week, the efforts of Microsoft, the JISC, London School of Economics, Neath Port Talbot and Oxford Computer Group delivered proof of the interoperability between Shibboleth and Microsoft's ADFS. Of course, this has been theorietically possible for nearly a year now but it doesn't seem that anyone has actually proved it. So, I'm really pleased to see that this breakthrough occurred through the collaboration of these different organisations in the UK to demonstrate the potential that ADFS can offer to those many customers in education wishing to have interoperability with Shibboleth.
During the Proof of Concept we were able to demonstrate the following:

An ADFS FS-A talking to a Shibboleth SP
A Shibboleth IdP talking to an ADFS FS-R
The ability to send a "privacy-enhanced" UPN (hash@adatum.com) into the TargetedID attribute.
The ability to manipulate other attributes/claims as we need to – although we haven't necessarily gone as far with this as we could

Source: Dominic : Shibboleth and ADFS Interoperability – this is now a reality!

HPC Leaders Demonstrate Interoperability Using OGF Specs

Dan Fay — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:49:57 GMT

Saw this demo while at SC06 today - this is great news for folks looking to use HPC clusters.

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) announced its interoperability demonstration at the Supercomputing 2006 (SC06) conference showing the work being done towards interoperable high performance computing (HPC). Organizations participating in the demonstration include Altair Engineering, CROWN, EGEE, Fujitsu Labs of Europe, Genesis II, Globus Alliance, HP, Microsoft, OMII-UK, Platform Computing, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and University of Virginia. These participants are exhibiting their prototype implementations of OGF standards and draft specifications used to enable heterogeneous integration of HPC Grid solutions.
The demonstration involves compute clusters processing various HPC applications submitted via OGF's Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSATM) HPC Profile draft specification, which leverages common Web Services specifications and existing OGF standards. The use of widely adopted Web Services and OGF specifications enables the interoperable interaction between different HPC middleware platforms.

Source: HPC Leaders Demonstrate Interoperability Using OGF Specs

Microsoft Enhances Interoperability With Open Virtualization Format: virtualization format software freely available to all.

Dan Fay — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 20:01:38 GMT

From the Microsoft Interoperability Web site -

Microsoft Enhances Interoperability With Open Virtualization Format

BRUSSELS, Belgium — Oct. 17, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced at the Interoperability Summit in Brussels that its virtualization format technology will now be available under its Open Specification Promise (OSP), an irrevocable promise from Microsoft to every individual and organization in the world to make use of this patented technology for free, now and forever when implementing specified open standards. Microsoft first announced the availability of an OSP for Web services specifications in September 2006 and now is expanding its customer-focused commitment to interoperability by applying the OSP to Microsoft’s Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Image Format specification.

Source: Microsoft Enhances Interoperability With Open Virtualization Format: Irrevocable promise will make Microsoft’s virtualization format software freely available to all.

SQL Server Hosting Toolkit... Launched !

Dan Fay — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 19:25:12 GMT

It would be interesting to see someone test out the SQL Server Hosting Toolkit for publishing their scientific data - imagine capturing it locally and then publishing it to a Science SQL hosting service, so all the other researchers in your space could test out their algorithms on your datasets.

Details on the Database Publishing Wizard as well as the download can be found at http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=sqlhost&title=Database%20Publishing%20Wizard.
Future plans for the Hosting Toolkit can be found at http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=sqlhost&title=Project%20Roadmap

From Laurent Bonnet [MS France] blog:

Very interesting addtion for web hosters who want to simplify their customers procedures on Shared or Dedicated hosted solutions using ASP.Net 2.0 and SQL Server 2005: Microsoft has just launched the SQL Server Hosting Toolkit with the release of the Database Publishing Wizard Community Technology Preview 1.
The objective of the SQL Server Hosting Toolkit is to enable a great experience around hosted SQL Server. The Database Publishing Wizard works toward this mission by making it easy to upload a database from a development box up to a shared hoster. In its first incarnation, the Database Publishing Wizard is a command line tool that generates a T-SQL script designed to be executed in the script execution windows provided by most hosters in their database management consoles.
In the coming months, Microsoft will be adding a GUI, integrate it into Visual Studio, and enable seamless deployment from the tool to an upload service hosters will be able to deploy.

Source: Web Hosting, French Way - by Laurent Bonnet [MS France] : SQL Server Hosting Toolkit... Launched !

Managed MPI Wrapper

Dan Fay — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 07:42:29 GMT

Saw this on Developer Blog - it would be great to see the managed MPI wrapper....

Managed MPI Wrapper

MPI is a widely used programming interface to develop parallel applications. .Net is also the one of the most popular framework used in Windows Platform. How can we develop a MPI application under the .Net framework?
Here is the answer: Managed MPI Wrapper.
The basic idea for this framework is wrapper the MPI APIs into a simple managed library. The developer can benefit from both the productivity features of .Net and the maturity of MPI APIs. Currently, I am working on creating a prototyping.

Source: Developer Blog : Managed MPI Wrapper

GridFTP and GRAM for the .NET Framework

Dan Fay — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 18:54:39 GMT

Marty Humphrey and his team have released an .NET implementation of many of the popular services provided by the Globus Toolkit.

Globus Interoperability for the .NET Platform

This site provides client and server implementations of two of the most popular services provided by the Globus Toolkit. The Globus Toolkit v. 4 (GT4) implementation of GridFTP, a data transfer protocol, and GRAM, a job execution protocol, are widely deployed in many scientific grids. We present implementations of both GridFTP and GRAM, services and clients, that run on the Microsoft .NET Framework and are interoperable with their GT4 counterparts.

Source: GridFTP and GRAM for the .NET Framework

Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) for Science

Dan Fay — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 06:45:19 GMT

I ran across the Microsoft Simple Sharing Extensions Specification today and am quite excited by it, especially for enabling loosely-cooperating apps to use RSS as a way to share data/items in a list. I'd be quite interested in other ideas on how it could be used with scientific data/research.

What is the Simple Sharing Extensions specification?

Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) is a specification that extends RSS from unidirectional to bidirectional information flows.
SSE defines the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely cooperating applications to use RSS as the basis for item sharing—that is, the bidirectional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items among two or more cross-subscribed feeds.
For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse's calendar, and vice versa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and add new appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or a doctor's appointment.
SSE allows you to replicate any set of independent items (for example, calendar entries, lists of contacts, list of favorites, blogrolls) using simple RSS semantics. If you can publish your data as an RSS feed, the simple addition of SSE will allow you to replicate your data to any other application that implements the SSE specification.

Source: XML Developer Center: Frequently Asked Questions for Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE)

Grid Security and SecPAL

Dan Fay — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 20:28:08 GMT

Last week at the OGF meeting in DC - Blair Dillaway presented their incubation work around SecPAL - Papers and slide deck are available on the Microsoft Research SecPAL web site (see http://research.microsoft.com/projects/SecPAL

Of specific interest, Blair's paper A Unified Approach to Trust, Delegation, and Authorization in Large-Scale Grids

The development of large-scale, decentralized distributed computing environments has highlighted the need for fine-grained control over trust relationships and delegated access rights. Existing approaches do not fully satisfy these needs. They typically lack precision and/or require an undesirable reliance on centralized administration to be effective. In addition, one finds multiple independent mechanisms, with disparate semantics, being used to manage trust, delegation and authorization. This makes it difficult to understand the effective security in large distributed systems and complicates their management.

The goal of the SecPAL project is to develop a language for expressing decentralized authorization policies, and to investigate language design and semantics, as well as related algorithms and analysis techniques. This project is a collaboration between the advanced technology incubation group of Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer and Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Digipede has a new release

Dan Fay — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 20:17:46 GMT

Just saw that Digipede annouced the release of Digipede Network Version 1.3 which features integration with Windows CCS, as well as an expanded API to provide developers with even greater control of how they grid-enable their applications.

Interesting articles and links 7/7/06

Dan Fay — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 06:51:00 GMT

CodePlex, Microsoft's community development Web site. You can use CodePlex to create new projects to share with your fellow developers around the world, join others who have already started their own projects, or use the applications on this site and provide feedback.

The IW Center - Community portal for information workers - has "Prodcasts"

Port25 - Communications from the Open Source Lab @ Microsoft

ODF Add-in for Word 2007 - Open XML Translator provides tools to build a technical bridge between the Open XML Formats and Open Document Format(ODF). As the first component of this initiative, the ODF Add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 allows to Open & Save ODF documents in Word.

On MSDN

Get the New Robotics Studio CTP

Get the SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition CTP

Editor's Note: Get Ready for AJAX

A New Developer Site for Windows Live

.NET Rocks! - Dan Ciruli on Grid Computing

RSS in IE7 and the RSS Platform

Extreme ASP.NET: Asynchronous Web Parts

Federated Identity – Scenarios, Architecture and Implementation

Step by Step: Developing a SQL Mobile Application with Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005