Using dynamic accounts to enable access to advanced resources through science gateways

Science Gateways have emerged as a valuable solution for providing large numbers of users with access to advanced computing resources. Additionally, they can hide many of the complexities often associated with using such resources effectively. Many gateways use a community account, which is shared by all gateway users on the backend compute resource. In some cases this can lead to problems when it comes to segregation of user data. To address this issue, we have investigated the use of dynamic accounts, where each gateway user is dynamically allocated their own account on the backend resource. We describe some of the features of the Dynamic Account service and explain how it has been integrated into the TeraGrid Visualization Gateway. We also discuss problems encountered, identify remaining open issues, and describe directions for future work.