I sat in on an interesting session at the CASC-HPCSIG meeting in Oxford last week, looking at different models for university-industry cooperation in high-performance computing. All considered that people, support and expertise are at least as important to a successful liaison as processors, so were slightly puzzled that publicity, bids and even informal discussions tend to focus almost entirely on size of hardware.

Research, and particularly the on-line collaborative research referred to as e-science, creates a new challenge for federated access management systems. In teaching, the authoritative statement whether an individual is entitled to access an on-line resource comes from their home organisation: are they a member of that course? are they covered by that institutional licence? Thus it is natural to provide a source of authorisation attributes alongside, or even as part of, the home organisation's authentication systems.