PROCESSORS

Entrust, Inc., a world-leader in securing digital identities and information, today announced that the High Performance Computing Virtual Lab (HPCVL) has reached a critical milestone in their deployment of Entrust solutions. Recently, HPCVL became a Certificate Authority (CA) through a swift and flawless audited CA key generation ceremony conducted by Entrust professionals. The High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory was founded by a consortium of four universities located in Ontario (Carleton University, Queen's University, The Royal Military College of Canada, and the University of Ottawa) and now also includes Ryerson University. HPCVL is dedicated to providing researchers in Canada with the secure high performance computing (HPC) resources they need to conduct innovative research in a broad spectrum of disciplines. HPCVL is a Center of Queen's University with professional management and an independent Board of Trustees. HPCVL has, since inception, held that strong authentication and encryption are necessary components of the secure and stable HPC environment. This requirement was critical in establishing an infrastructure to be used for diverse research areas such as medicine, engineering, economics, and chemistry. The protection of intellectual property and other confidential information, as well as data integrity, is key for researchers intent on commercializing their results or working with, for example, patient data and any other data subject to compliance regulations. "Our portal allows a secure and reliable way for researchers to access our resources from virtually anywhere in the world. The ability to integrate strong authentication into our portal environment was a critical requirement in HPCVL's design," said Dr. Kenneth Edgecombe, Executive Director of HPCVL. "By using the Entrust TruePass product, HPCVL has been able to develop and is deploying a Secure Grid Portal that protects intellectual property and information, and really keeps complexities to a minimum. That's important, because it allows our researchers to focus on work and not get side-tracked by security details and concerns." The creation of the HPCVL CA is the latest initiative in a long relationship with Entrust. HPCVL has deployed the Entrust Authority Security Manager, the Entrust Authority Roaming Server and the Entrust TruePass system in order to integrate strong security into their Secure Grid Portal. The Secure Grid Portal helps researchers and users of the HPCVL portal to protect intellectual property rights and meet compliance and regulatory guidelines without complex or lengthy processes. With the help of Entrust, HPCVL's CA key generation ceremony - a detailed and audited process by which a critical point of system security and trust, the CA certificate signing key, is generated to validate all digital credentials processed by the CA - was accomplished in only eight hours. "Everything went very well; I was quite impressed," noted Dr. Edgecombe. "When embarking upon an initiative of this scale, security must be factored in from the beginning as HPCVL has done. Furthermore, the security established needs to be easy to use and transparent to users," said Kevin Simzer, Senior Vice President at Entrust. "We take pride in the work we've done with HPCVL. We are encouraged by their vision of enabling their researchers to promote and focus on their forward-thinking work via HPCVL's secure portal, and we're pleased to be a part of their on-going process to provide member institutions with trusted access to high-performance computing resources."