UK National Grid Service - Grid Computing: Infrastructure, Service, and Applications - page 151

accepted through the NGS Web site with certii cate signing (securely
generating requested certii cates) performed every working day by a
member of the core NGS support staff. There are nominally i ve people at
RAL authorized to/capable of signing certii cates. Note, however, that the
elapsed time between a request for an initial certii cate and the certii cate
being generated and dispatched is usually greater than one day, due to
the requirement of a face to face meeting between the applicant and their
local RA.

6.7.1.3 Registration Authority

An RA is a body that approves a user's request for a digital certii cate
from the UK Certii cation Authority. An RA operator performs the role of
validating a user's identity and passing that information to the certii ca-
tion authority. In summary, a user must present photographic ID to their
local RA operator to verify their identity before their request for a digital
certii cate is approved. A process is followed by which the RA operator
interacts with the certii cate authority in order for the user to obtain a
certii cate.
The support center is responsible for the creation of new RAs, and
ensuring the RAs understand their roles and responsibilities as well as
providing training for new RA operators (see Section 6.7.1.7 ) , and man-
ages RAs and RA operators. A review of existing RAs is also performed
by the support center.

6.7.1.4 NGS Resources

The NGS Support Center oversees the provision of core resources at the
four founding sites and also has a major role in managing the information
relating to each site, overseeing the site's service-level description review
process, and collating and publishing site-specii c information.
Information on each site's resources is available on the NGS Web site.
Published information contains detail on the resources available at each
site, hostnames, available applications, and details relevant for each site
that they choose to publish. Each core and partner site must also publish
a service-level description that is agreed by the technical board; these
documents are available on the NGS Web site.

6.7.1.5 User Support

The support center provides the following services:

• Guidance and assistance for users applying for access and using

the NGS resources from initial application for a certii cate through
to using an application/accessing data on the NGS. Users are