TAGPMA

OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA - The International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF) expanded its membership substantially when The Americas Grid Policy Management Authority (TAGPMA) voted to admit nine new members at its second face-to-face meeting held in Ottawa, July 17-19, 2006.

"This expansion will greatly enhance our ability to interact with users from Latin America, TeraGrid and Universities throughout the Americas", said Darcy Quesnel, chair of TAGPMA.

Membership in TAGPMA is open to Grid authentication providers and Grid relying parties operating in the Americas. TAGPMA accredits its members’ Grid authentication services to IGTF-approved authentication standards. TAGPMA accreditation allows members to interoperate with other IGTF participants in worldwide collaborations on the Grid.

The IGTF is a federation of the three regional policy management authorities: the Asia Pacific Grid Policy Management Authority, the European Policy Management Authority, and TAGPMA. Together these policy management authorities include 70 site and organization members, allowing thousands of researchers to authenticate to tens of thousands of Grid resources such as supercomputers and data stores all over the world.

Founding members from the U.S. and Canada - including CANARIE that was hosting this event – expressed their satisfaction in having new contributors to the innovative work that the body is undertaking. Members such as HEBCA/USHER, Open Science Grid, TeraGrid, EELA, and DOEGrids/ESnet have been working on developing a new IGTF Authentication Profile which will be used to approve a new class of Grid Authentication service providers. The new IGTF profile will allow sites with well managed user account databases to translate their user identities into globally recognized Grid identities.

In addition, TAGPMA has begun investigation of interoperability with and leveraging of non-Grid-specific PKIs via the innovative use of bridge certificate authority technologies, to potentially deliver grid resources to a far wider and significantly expanded community.

The new TAGPMA members are: Universidade Federal Fluminense from Brazil represented by Vinod Rebello, Universidad de los Andes from Venezuela represented by Vanessa Hamar, Red Univesitaria Nacional from Chile represented by Juan Carlos Martinez, Universidad Nacional de La Plata from Argentina represented by Javier Díaz, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México represented by Alejandro Núñéz, National Center for Supercomputing Applications represented by Jim Basney, Texas Advanced Computer Center represented by Margaret Murray, Purdue University represented by Matthew Lundmark, and University of Virginia represented by Jim Jokl.

For more information contact Darcy Quesnel.