virtual organizations, real support
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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?) - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
Virtual Organizations, Real Support
RL “Bob” Morgan
University of Washington
Advance CAMP, June 2005
2
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?
3
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?
5
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