Virtual Organisations And Grids
From ESIWiki
Virtual Organisations and Grids: Applications, Patterns and Infrastructures
21-22 November, 2006 National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh
This workshop is organised by Grid Computing Now!. The organisers are grateful to the E-Science Institute for use of the ESI Wiki.
Overview
Virtual Organisations (VOs) are formed when two or more organisations work together on a common goal or project. In Grid computing, VO management tools are needed which allow organisations to join a project and authorise access to their (or their collaborators’) resources according to the needs and policies of each member organisation. Several projects are investigating the best way to conceptualise and manage VOs. These projects are producing and deploying several VO management infrastructures.
The goal of this workshop is to compare different notions of "virtual organisation" and to compare tools (both existing and in development) with the requirements of several application areas. Speakers will present use cases from different applications areas and tools that have been or are being developed to address these requirements. Applications areas may include collaborative engineering (chemical, civil, automotive, and aerospace), e-health, high-energy physics or e-learning).
These talks and demonstrations will cover the mechanisms for managing the membership of VOs and also those that control of who is authorised to use which resources. Workshop participants will examine questions such as whether the use cases share common patterns, whether all application areas can be supported by a single infrastructure, and whether the infrastructures can be made to interoperate.
The outcome of the workshop will be a written report that describes the current situation and presents the results of the discussion. We intend that this should influence future development and deployment.
Draft Programme
Tuesday November 21st
| 13:00 | Registration & Coffee | |
| 13:45 | Welcome and Overview | Dave Berry |
| 14:00-15:30 | Requirements How VOs are formed now and what systems are currently used to support them | |
| A Chemical Process Development Case Study as a source of requirements for the GOLD project | Allen Wright | |
| Virtual Organizations: a Business Perspective | Carsten Franke | |
| From VOMS to TrustCoM: VO Management from academia to business | Michael Wilson | |
| Looking at the ‘O’ of VOs – organisational aspects of collaboration | Rob Procter | |
| 15:30-16:00 | Tea/Coffee | |
| 16:00-17:30 | Middleware Now Existing middleware solutions | |
| Controlling VO access to your resources | David Chadwick | |
| EGEE VO Management | Frederic Schaer | |
| The OMII-UK software release: Current and future support for VO's | Steven Newhouse | |
| Experiences from three VO investigations: CONOISE-G, COVITE and VOICE | Alex Gray | |
| 19:30 | Workshop Dinner |
Wednesday November 22nd
| 9:00-10:30 | Exploratory projects Pilots of new approaches | |
| BROADEN: VO requirements in a Distributed Health Monitoring Application | Tom Jackson | |
| Virtual Organisations Supporting Collaborative Product Design in Industry | Mike Boniface | |
| Supporting Dynamic Virtual Organisations in the Education Domain | Richard Sinnott | |
| Collaboration Grids, Group Forming Networks and Virtual Organisations | Stephen Pickles | |
| 10:30-11:00 | Tea/Coffee | |
| 11:00-12:30 | Next-generation Middleware Projects investigating new approaches | |
| Virtual Organisations in Next Generation Grids | Mike Surridge | |
| Contract Based VO Management: issues and potential solutions | Lutz Schubert | |
| Managing complex relationships in virtual organisations | Rob Smith | |
| The INWA and INCA Grids - "a cornerstone of commercial and social collaboration"? | Ashley Lloyd | |
| 12:30-13:30 | Lunch | |
| 13:30-15:00 | Breakout sessions Discussions | |
| 15:00-15:30 | Tea/Coffee | |
| 15:30-17:00 | The Way Forward Conclusions, recommendations and report plan |
Questions for Discussion/Breakout sessions
Please use the Virtual Organisations and Grids Questions page to gather issues and topics for discussion.
Registration, Directions and Further Information
Please Register for this workshop.
Information and Directions to the eScience Institute.
Abstracts
A Chemical Process Development Case Study as a source of requirements for the GOLD project
The UK fine chemical industries need to improve their modest $9 – $12 billion share of the $250 billion global markets. Manufacturers focus on new product development as a means of growth, with time to market as the primary driver. Analysts state that more structured mechanisms for managing the innovation process must emerge if companies are to extract maximum profitability.
An increasing trend to outsource services creates a supply network of specialist companies interacting with manufacturers. Different specialist companies may be involved at all stages in the R&D lifecycle, providing services ranging from basic research or safety testing, to commercial services. Many chemical companies use contract and toll manufacturers to increase capacity, retain flexibility and access specialist technology. Within the scope defined by the e-Science initiative, these companies collaborate in Virtual Organisations (VOs). Each project can be considered to have its own VO, with a set of members overlapping to varying degrees with other projects. A large chemical company may operate hundreds of R&D projects each with a VO of unique composition. Each VO is a highly dynamic entity in which members may change frequently in response to decisions during the course of the project.
GOLD is an EPSRC funded e-Science pilot project which aims to accelerate the Chemical Process Development (CPD) lifecycle through the enablement of VOs and active Information Management. This complex application domain has two dominant interacting characteristics, which have not been explored by previous Grid research, namely Highly Dynamic Virtual Organisations and Full Lifecycle Focus. The aim of this paper is describe in detail the activities and complexities of Chemical Process Development (CPD) in the context of an actual project undertaken in collaboration with a number of companies as part of the development of the GOLD demonstrator.
Virtual Organizations: a Business Perspective
The talk will introduce the provision of services as the main motivation of generating Virtual Organizations. In detail, it will be shown that the provision of services and the provision of hardware resources is similar from the conceptual point of view. Thus, the main characteristics of Virtual Organizations will be summarized combined with a brief overview of existing Virtual Organizations in real-live scenarios. During the talk, we will further discuss the main motivations to establish Virtual Organizations from the scientific point of view and from the business perspective. Subsequently, the main concepts and the corresponding constraints of generating Virtual Organizations within business scenarios will be described.
From VOMS to TrustCoM: VO Management from academia to business
Organisations work together in many different topologies as customer, suppliers or partners in order to manage the risks inherent in each relationship. Academic organisations are willing to collaborate in relationships where the risks and rewards are neither legally documented nor accounted during the collaboration. In business relationships both clear legal specification of the objectives, rewards and risks of the relationships are required as well as careful monitoring of finances, quality, delivery etc.. during the collaboration. The Grid for academic VO's uses VOMS to authenticate users but allows them freedom to use all available resources after this. A business Grid needs to go further, and carefully specify the expected role of each organisation in the business activity of the VO, the access controls for individual organisations in a VO to data and services required to achieve this role, the quality of service expected in each role, and then add terms to apply when these conditions are breached. TrustCoM has been designed to provide an environment to meet these requirements for undertaking business over a Grid.
Looking at the ‘O’ of VOs – organisational aspects of collaboration
Drawing upon ethnographic case studies of two settings where technology has been introduced to mediate collaborative work accross organisational boundaries this talk examine how these attempts intersect with the messy details of collaborative work. In particular, the talk examines how informal 'seen but unnoticed' practices are crucial for establishing and maintaining collaboration and trust, but are often overlooked in the sorts of technology provision and focus typically employed in forming and supporting VOs.
Controlling VO access to your resources
This talk will present a conceptual model for grid authorisation, and describe the functionalities of the different components in the model. The talk will then introduce some of the actual implementations of all or parts of the model that are available today. The talk will demonstrate some of the user friendly tools that are available today to help a resource manager create the authorisation policies that will control access to his VO resources. The talk will conclude by briefly mentioning a new research project that will allow these policies to be specified in controlled natural language.
EGEE VO Management
The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project brings together scientists and engineers from more than 90 institutions in 32 countries world-wide to provide a Grid infrastructure for e-Science that is available to scientists 24 hours-a-day. With over 200 sites, 30000 CPUs and 100 declared VOs, user and VO Management has become a key element in operating the EGEE infrastructure. This presentation will show how VOs and users are currently handled in EGEE.
The OMII-UK software release: Current and future support for VO's.
The OMII-UK software releases uses WS-Security to authenticate incoming messages and outgoing messages. The presentation will discuss current and future plans for container wide authorisation and support for multiple hosting environments within different virtual organisations.
Experiences from three VO investigations: CONOISE-G, COVITE and VOICE
As part of our e-Science research at Cardiff University we have worked in three separate areas investigating aspects of VOs to support collaborative working in different application domains with external organisations. This presentation will cover aspects of VO requirements identified by the three projects described below.
In CONOISE-G we investigated with Southampton University, Aberdeen University, and BT how to build an architecture that allowed services to be provided to customers via agent technologies through a VO to members of the VO. The users of the VO stated the services they wanted and the quality of service required. The agents formed consortia to bid for the contract. The winning consortia are monitored to determine if the service continues to be provided at the right level after a contract is agreed. The work involved investigating how to form consortia for a requirement, the bidding process, the monitoring of the delivery, with respect to trust, quality and the policing of the services being supplied.
In COVITE we investigated how a VO in a Grid environment could be used to support consortia in the construction industry bidding for large civil engineering projects. This involved investigating, how information from different suppliers available through the net, could be accessed by the members of the consortia. This involved aspects of security and data access to heterogeneous distributed information sources.
In VOICE we are investigating how VOs can support the movement in healthcare to Multi-Disciplinary Care Teams to support patient care. This involves building on top of the current legacy healthcare systems a VO which supports the collaborative working of the team looking after a particular patient. The Care Team cover a broad range of people involved in the patient's treatment and working in different sectors of healthcare - primary, secondary and tertiary - who need to collaborate in the move to patient centric treatment of an illness.
BROADEN: VO requirements in a Distributed Health Monitoring Application
BROADEN is a Rolls-Royce led DTI funded Technology Programme project, investigating the use of Grid technologies to support Rolls-Royce engineering applications. The set of applications being investigated include computational modelling, after market support optimisation and distributed health condition monitoring. This presentation will discuss the Grid requirements to support the complex Virtual Organisation presented by the health monitoring applications. Key features of these distributed systems are the broad range of stake-holders from differing commercial organisations, the complex geographic and commercial boundaries that have to be crossed, the need for high levels of security and integrity, and the need for near real-time response from the diagnostic systems. These requirements are stretching the limits of the available Grid and SOA technologies.
Virtual Organisations Supporting Collaborative Product Design in Industry
Development of industrial and large-scale products and services poses complex problems. The processes used to develop these products and services typically involve a large number of independent organisational entities at different locations grouped in partnerships and supply chains. Grid is connectivity plus interoperability and is a major contributor to improved collaboration and an enabler of virtual organisations. The SIMDAT consortium is comprised of leading software and process system developers and representatives from strategic industry and service sectors: Audi, BAESystems, DWD, EADS, ESI, EUMETSAT, ECMWF, GlaxoSmithKline, MeteoFrance, Renault, and the UK Met Office. This presentation will examine each SIMDAT application sector to understand the business drivers underlying decisions to participate in Grid-based business partnerships and shows how these business drivers impact the infrastructure choices that are adopted.
Supporting Dynamic Virtual Organisations in the Education Domain
The DyVOSE project was funded by JISC to explore technologies to support the establishment and management of security focused virtual organisations in the education domain - specifically to support the Grid Computing module part of the advanced MSc at the University of Glasgow. The project looked initially at virtual organisations based on static privilege management infrastructures linking Grid services to statically defined and deployed authorisation policies. In the latter of the project, focus was on dynamic privilege management infrastructures where new dynamic policies could be supported including exploitation of services for delegation of authority. This talk will describe both of these different scenarios and the experiences in supporting these kinds of solutions.
Collaboration Grids, Group Forming Networks and Virtual Organisations
A Group-Forming Network (GFN) is a network that facilitates the formation of sub-networks. Reed's Law asserts that the value of a GFN grows exponentially with the size of the GFN. In this talk, I consider the consequences that would follow from a common grid infrastructure that functioned as the Group Forming Network for Virtual Organisations, and I discuss how the collaboration grids of today fall short of this ideal. I describe how the notion of a VO is proving to be crucial to the UK's National Grid Service for establishing scalable models for user management, authorisation, accounting and partnership. Finally, I defend my claims that the appropriate relationship between a VO and a grid is a consumer-provider relationship, that VOs need to have global scope, beyond the boundaries of any single production grid, and that the VO must become a first class entity in the design of grids if these are ever to fulfil their promise.
Virtual Organisations in Next Generation Grids
NextGRID is developing a next generation Grid architecture to meet the needs of businesses. This involves supporting a much wider range of virtual enterprise models than the traditional virtual organisation infrastructure provided by e-Science Grids. This presentation will cover a classification of VO models arising from EC IST Grid projects, based on work from the cross-project collaboration group on Trust and Security (TG6), and discuss how these diverse VO models are being addressed architecturally in the NextGRID project using Web Service Security and Service Level Agreements.
Contract Based VO Management: issues and potential solutions
Virtual Organisations, being a form of business collaborations, show a strong requirement for contractual binding of the involved parties. Major issues related to this consist (a) in the enforcement of contractual terms and (b) the relationship of responsibilities with respect to the overall VO's business goal. The respective choices have an direct impact on the structure and management of Virtual Organisations, as shall be explained by this presentation. The approaches will concentrate mainly on the results by TrustCoM and NextGrid.
Managing complex relationships in virtual organisations
As computer scientists, we are sometimes guilty of trying to fit existing technology to problems, without necessarily addressing some of the core issues. This is evident in virtual organisations, where information is often stored implicitly and inefficiently within and between organisations, making it very difficult to locate and use. Unfortunately, these second-order issues are not always addressed by the technology we deploy.
Part of the problem is that it is difficult to configure the conversation between service providers and consumers to meet the specific requirements of that relationship, particularly when that relationship and its related circumstances are subject to change. For example, in healthcare it is highly desirable to configure available health services to patients' individual, changing needs and in chemical industry R&D projects, it is important to understand how circumstantial issues may impact success factors such as cost and time to market.
This talk will describe the technology developed by the GOLD project and explain how it can be used in conjunction with supporting tools and techniques to address some of the second-order difficulties that plague complex organisations.
The INWA and INCA Grids - "a cornerstone of commercial and social collaboration"?
Analyses of the 'competitiveness of nations' are traditionally embedded in ideas of scale and distance. The relevance of this to competition in global markets in which trade is mediated by electronic networks has been challenged by the 'Web, but without the promised 'death of distance'.
The Grid vision of an easily reconfigurable virtual organisation or cluster supported by 'computing on demand', provides more focus on the requirements of synchronous business process within global markets. However, distance, time and time zone still provide challenges for the efficiency with which computational tasks can be distributed, and effectiveness with which distributed teams are supported.
The INWA (Innovation Node: Western Australia) and INCA (Innovation Node: Chinese Academy) connect nodes at the extrema of the world's largest synchronous market (2 Billion people in the same time zone). It was the first application of the Grid to connect sites in three continents and was described by Sun Microsystems as the future "cornerstone of commercial and social collaboration".
This talk describes the INWA and INCA Grids and shows how the needs of collaborative socio-economic data analysis and modelling in global markets can be met using Grid technologies. This application of the Grid is clearly relevant to the competitiveness of (virtual) production-focussed organisations; however establishing the products, services and values on which future national competitiveness will depend requires national innovation systems to be inter-connected. In this regard we need to be careful whether the current Global Grid roadmap is developing networks for invention rather than for innovation.
