Virtual Organizations, Real Support

RL “Bob” Morgan

University of Washington

Advance CAMP, June 2005

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Why We're HereWhy We're Here

• Virtual Organizations (VOs) are proliferating• (what's a VO and does it differ from a Regular O?)

• increasingly they are the venues for collaborative academic and research activities

• increasingly they are the activities that are funded

• like everyone, they rely increasingly on IT resources to conduct work, colloborate, and publish

• IT organizations support institutional computing and information management activities• what should they be doing to support VOs?

• what happens if they don't support them?

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How do you tell a VO?How do you tell a VO?

• Foster et al definition (re Grids):• “a set of individuals and/or institutions defined by ...

sharing rules”, sharing “direct access to computers, software, data and other resources” for “collaborative problem-solving”. (The Anatomy of the Grid, 2001)

• So a VO, for our purposes, is ...• multi-institutional

• collaboration on some intellectual product

• requires controlled access to real computing or computer-accessible resources

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How do you tell an institution?How do you tell an institution?

• That is, a Regular, non-Virtual, Organization

• Bricks and mortar

• HR and payroll

• Policy manuals and org hierarchy and ID cards

• Grant-hosting entity?

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VO examplesVO examples

• “Big science” and engineering• many many: NEESit, EU DataGrid, GriPhyN,

PlanetLab, ...

• Life Science / Biotech• many many: caBIG, BIRN, ...

• Academic consortia in many fields• ResearchChannel, Vivarium, many more ...

• Open-source software projects ...

• Many other organizational-work spaces

• This workshop?

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VO variationsVO variations

• Scale• from multi-million $, multi-year, >1K participant,

multi-country projects ...

• to two researchers sharing a resource?

• Data-oriented, device-oriented, collab-oriented

• Long-term stable to very dynamic• in terms of users, resource usage, policies

• R&HE-centric to commercial-centric to topic-area-centric

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What do VOs need?What do VOs need?

• many of the same things ROs need

• identity and access management• users, passwords, certs, tokens, ID proofing

• attributes, authz/role/group/policy management, access control

• computing/networking operations management• service hosting, system administration, config mgt

• network admin, bandwidth mgt

• firewalls, intrusion detection, virus protection

• storage, managed storage lifecycle, repository

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What do VOs need?What do VOs need?

• high-performance computing support• distrib computing tools, clustering

• scheduling, resource discovery

• collaboration tools• web hosting, content management, search, portal,

LMS integration

• mailing lists, chat

• wiki, blog

• audio/video conferencing

• calendaring

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What do VOs need?What do VOs need?

• other• software development, architecture, integration

• IPR support, licensing, legal, compliance, audit

• logos, design

• financial administration

• event logistics support

• semantic definitions

• data de-identification services

• voting / assessment tools

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So aren't we doing all this?So aren't we doing all this?

• Multi-institutional makes everything harder• in IAM, strong identity proofing for credential

assignment depends on physical presence

• can't (today) use campus-managed identities and credentials multi-instititutionally

• policies mandate complex multi-owner resource management

• institutional policies of participants may conflict

• physical distance puts more emphasis on collaboration tools

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Anything else that's hard?Anything else that's hard?

• Dynamic makes everything harder• more burden on policy, administration, ops

• timescales make RoI difficult to assess

• Virtuality makes everything harder• implies fewer dedicated support staff

• everything may have to be shared

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What are IT shops doing?What are IT shops doing?

• getting better at providing all those services institutionally

• getting better at some kinds of VO-like entities, eg regular courses

• looking at federated I&AM

• what are you doing ?

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Isn't this like departmental Isn't this like departmental computing support?computing support?

• Central IT and departments• long murky shifting relationship

• dept computing growing both more sophisticated and more dependent on central IT

• is a department a VO?• not really, fails multi-institutional test

• but intra-inst multi-dept collab looks a lot like VO

• some “campus” orgs have VO-like independence

• good methods for VO support should benefit dept support and vice versa

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Federations and VOsFederations and VOs

• Federations are being promoted for managing multi-institutional trust relationships

• is a federation a VO?• scale of federations is intended to support many

many inter-institutional activities, hence many VOs

• administration of fed itself may be a VO ...

• do federations solve VO problems?• will help with some multi-institutional I&AM issues ...

but just a part of the overall solution