Abstract: A method is presented for processing transactions in a federated computational environment. Resource requests are received at a first federated entity from a second federated entity. The first federated entity responds to federation protocol operations for the second federated entity in accordance with a trust relationship between the first and second federated entity. The services of the first federated entity are provided by a set of data processing systems within a distributed data processing system, and each data processing system in the set of data processing systems is able to act as an identity provider. A first data processing system in the set of data processing systems establishes itself to act as an identity provider for the set of data processing systems with respect to the second federated entity and then is employed to perform federated protocol operations as an identity provider for requests from the second federated entity.