[Oscar-users] How about .... anonymous OSCARing ?

[Mike Mettke]

All,

here's an idea I've been toying with:

An OSCAR cluster in the end provides a service to a customer, such as running parallel programs. Currently, we import for customer authentication the associated /etc/passwd file and for customer data the user filespace via nfs. This requires a lot of updating, and also, most importantly, reflects the view that the customer network is homogenous with OSCAR.

Now, in my practical experience, I've rarely seen organizations which have a single, fully homogenous network. For historical and political reasons, I usually see 2 or 3 networks or clusters in a single organization. Your mileage may vary, however.

The expense associated with OSCAR cluster creates some pressure to make the computing power associated with OSCAR available to multiple customer clusters. Importing the user authentication data is usually difficult, since the user ID space is non-orthogonal across multiple clusters. Also, opening up the data space is difficult as well, since data on the customer clusters is sometimes not well enough compartmentalized, leading to the situation of access to all data or none at all. In the end OSCAR shouldn't have to care about restrictions associated with each customers data set, as long as all OSCAR jobs + date are compartmentalized against each other.

How about:

1. OSCAR runs all jobs anonymously, such as oscaruser ?
Maybe we can create and array of 10,000 oscarusers, like oscaruser1....oscauser10000, and randomly pick one ID to execute under.
This would provide job-job data and user ID separation.

2. This does mean all necessary user data is copied for each job from customer clusters into OSCAR. Associated results would have to be copied back. PBS has some mechanism for this via the "stage file" option.
If that seems wasteful, nfs is in the end doing exactly the same, that is, copying the necessary data from host A to host B.

3. The headnode would have to have some authentication mechanism, based on host and/or domainnames and possibly users, such as

*.domain1.com
*.domain2.com
hosta.domain3.com
hostb.domain4.com wilma
hostc.domain5.com fred


What do you think ?

just wondering,
Mike


--
Wireless Advanced Technologies Lab
Bell Labs - Lucent Technologies



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