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RL “Bob” Morgan University of Washington Advance CAMP, June 2005. Virtual Organizations, Real Support. Why We're Here. Virtual Organizations (VOs) are proliferating (what's a VO and does it differ from a Regular O?)
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RL “Bob” Morgan University of Washington Advance CAMP, June 2005 Virtual Organizations, Real Support
Why 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?
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
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?
VO 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?
VO 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
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
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
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
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
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
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 ?
Isn't this like departmental 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
Federations 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