Dr Scott Koranda1, Mr John Scullen2, Dr Jim Basney1, Mr Terrence Fleury1, Dr Jeff Gaynor1, Dr Andrew Patterson3
1CILogon, NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA, 2Australian Access Federation, Brisbane, Australia, 3University of Melbourne Centre for Cancer Research, Melbourne, Australia
The Australian Biocommons’ mission is to “enhance Australia’s digital life science research through world class collaborative distributed infrastructure”. BioCommons’ diverse audience of 33,000 life science researchers require collaborative access to a multitude of service providers including computing centres, commercial and private cloud services, universities, hospitals, government agencies, analysis platforms, data storage, and data transfer services. BioCommons has partnered with the Australian Access Federation (AAF) to create trust and identity infrastructure for an internationally integrated Australian genomics research federation.
Australia has not previously centrally invested in infrastructure that implements the Authentication and Authorization for Research and Collaboration (AARC) Blueprint Architecture (BPA). BioCommons is the first Australian project with sufficient scope and means to pursue the investment. BioCommons’ ambitions catalysed introducing advanced federation solutions like the AARC BPA to Australia.
AAF partnered with CILogon for collaboration management and federated identity solutions that implement the BPA, and focused on a proof-of-concept with the Human Genomes Platform Project. CILogon added streamlined AAF and eduGAIN integration to the Gen3 genomics platform and began issuing Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) Passports for authorisation to specific datasets. Demonstrating how CILogon overcomes specific challenges has generated buy-in across a wider research community.
AAF and CILogon are working toward a reseller arrangement that will include a new local CILogon deployment hosted at AWS Sydney, with AAF providing local support. AAF and CILogon plan to expand the service to meet the needs of Australian research communities in other disciplines, building on lessons learned from the BioCommons collaboration.
Biography:
John Scullen has more than 20 years experience across a range of operational and project roles in IT and the education industry including recent experience managing business and technology challenges associated with shifting applications to cloud-based delivery. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0390-4377
Scott Koranda specializes on identity management architectures that streamline and enhance collaboration for research organizations. He has been a member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) collaboration for over 20 years, and was co-principal investigator on the NSF grant that funded COmanage development. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4478-9026