The EC IST GRIA project started at the end of 2001 and ended successfully in late 2004. The consortium was led by IT Innovation.

The goal of the project was to make Grid computing usable by industry. Users wanted to be able to set up Grid computations in minutes rather than weeks, in the presence of firewalls and network administrators. They needed mutual authentication between sites, and well-defined business processes that allow management of trust and quality of service. Industrial users also wanted a system that gave minimal authorisation to remote users.

To address these needs we used off-the-shelf Web Services technology rather than the then-existing e-Science Grid technology such as Globus. We designed services to manage jobs and data storage, subject to negotiated quality of service, for trusted B2B customers. Users have access only to pre-defined services, and authorisation uses a dynamic approach based on Grid identity with no local account mappings. Access rights change depending on the state of negotiations with the service provider, and can be delegated to colleagues or other services, avoiding mechanisms like GSI that involve impersonation of the original user. This combination of features allowed the GRIA project to meet its goals: users can join a GRIA network of trust very rapidly, and network administration overheads are extremely low, yet every computation and data transfer is subject to a well-defined security policy and quality-of-service allocation.

Shortly after the project began, the wider Grid community also turned to Web Services with the launch of OGSA in early 2002, and ever since the worlds of Grid and Web Services have been converging. This is very positive, and is making it easier for network administrators to trust our increasingly off-the-shelf, firewall-friendly middleware.