GENIE GENIELabPrerequisites

Andrew Price, University of Southampton, ([mailto:a.r.price@soton.ac.uk a.r.price@soton.ac.uk])

GENIELab Prerequisites
To make full use of the GENIELab software you will need the following:

Matlab
GENIELab is supported for the following releases of Matlab:
 * Matlab 6.5 (release 13)
 * Matlab 7.0 (release 14)
 * Matlab 7.0.1 (release 14SP1)
 * Matlab 7.0.4 (release 14SP2)
 * Matlab 7.1.0 (release 14SP3)
 * Matlab 7.2.0 (release 2006a)
 * Matlab 7.3.0 (release 2006b)
 * Matlab 7.4.0 (release 2007a) untested

Personal X.509 Certificate
The security and auditing mechanisms for the database system and the UK National Grid service are built upon certificate based authentication. In order to use the GENIE database, the UK National Grid Service and to gain access to Grid resources that are exposed through the Globus Toolkit v2.4 you will need to own a certificate issued by an acceptable certificate authority. Certificates from the following authorities are acceptable for registration in the database (please contact a.r.price@soton.ac.uk if the issuing authority for your certificate is not in this list):


 * RFC822 Name=ca-operator@grid-support.ac.uk

For members of the GENIE(fy) project a certificate can be requested from the UK e-Science Certification Authority (CA) which provides X.509 certificates for the UK e-Science community. The certificate authority is part of the Grid Operations Support Centre (GOSC) funded by the Research Councils' core e-Science programme. Please follow the instructions provided by the CA to obtain a certificate:


 * http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/ 

Once an acceptable certificate is available its Distinguished Name (DN) will need to be registered in the database. This is most easily obtained by visiting:


 * https://ca.grid-support.ac.uk/

with the browser storing your certificate and clicking on the "Test Certificate" menu item. This will take you to a page describing your certificate. The certificate DN string must be sent to an administrator of the GENIE database so that it can be mapped in to the database. E.g. A typical certificate DN string reads:


 * "/C=UK/O=eScience/OU=Southampton/L=SeSC/CN=full name"

This string is added to the database so that only authenticated users may access the system.

The Geodise Toolboxes and the GENIE database system use the Globus Toolkit to provide much of the Grid functionality. You will need to export your X.509 certificate to pem format in order to exploit these tools. There is excellent and comprehensive documentation for managing your certificate on the GOSC website. The particular pages detailing the preparation of a certificate for use with the Globus Toolkit are here:


 * http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/content/view/67/42/

Please follow these instructions in order to export your certificate from a browser and generate two pem files; usercert.pem and userkey.pem. As detailed in the above instructions, please install these files in the directory ~/.globus. On a Linux/UNIX platform these files should have user read-only permissions (0400).

National Grid Service Registration
All raw data files archived in the GENIE database system are stored on one of the data nodes of the National Grid Service (NGS). We therefore require users to register with the NGS in order to gain access to the data. There is a single page form to fill out at:


 * https://www.ngs.ac.uk/apply.php

Please fill in your personal details as appropriate. For a single user the usage requirements we tend to ask for are the following:

A new account requester should then provide some details of their work and include something along these lines:


 * "I am a member of the GENIE project and require access to the RAL data node of the NGS in order to access the project's shared data repository. Please could you add my account to the 'genie' UNIX group on the grid-data.rl.ac.uk node.”

The NGS currently promise to review new account requests within 10 working days. Once an account has been created we recommend checking that the data directories can be accessed. Please refer to sections 4.1 and 4.2 for details on how to do this.

OptionsMatlab Gendat License Key
The OPTIONS Design Search and Optimisation software will only function if a valid license key file is installed on the host machine. Details of how to obtain and install a license key are provided here:
 * OptionsMatlab Gendat License Key