Security on the US fusion grid

The National Fusion Collaboratory project is developing and deploying new distributed computing and remote collaboration technologies with the goal of advancing magnetic fusion energy research. This has led to the development of the U.S. fusion grid (FusionGrid), a computational grid composed of collaborative, compute, and data resources from the three large U.S. fusion research facilities and with users both in the U.S. and in Europe. Critical to the development of FusionGrid was the creation and deployment of technologies to ensure security in a heterogeneous environment. These solutions to the problems of authentication, authorization, data transfer, and secure data storage, as well as the lessons learned during the development of these solutions, may be applied outside of FusionGrid and scale to future computing infrastructures such as those for next-generation devices like ITER.