TG8 – Virtual Organisations

Technical working Groups (TG) are part of the European Grid Concertation Initiative and funded by the European Union Sixth Framework Information Society Technology Programme (EU-FP6 IST). Their purpose is to provide a forum for discussion, exchange of information and the state-of-the-art, thus emphasizing collaboration throughout EU-FP6 IST Grid projects.
Technical Working Group 8 (TG8) specifically addresses the topics of virtual organization management in next generation grids.

In the framework of the Grid Concertation Meeting during the EGTD 2006 in Brussels, Belgium, Christine Morin (XtreemOS project leader) organized a BoF session on September 21st, 2006. The idea was to investigate the opportunity to create a new Technical Group (TG) on Virtual Organizations.
This first session attracted more than 38 persons from over 20 Grid-related European projects: This attendance confirmed the great interest raised by the topic of Virtual Organizations Management on next generation Grid architectures and confirmed a need for this new Technical Group.

The new VO management technical group focuses on all aspects of virtual organization management in next generation Grid architectures. Several IST Grid-related projects are interested in VO management. This technical group‘s goal is to give the opportunity to share knowledge, to compare the different approaches studied by the various projects and to identify topics of common interest to be further investigated.

This TG is co-chaired by Christine Morin (INRIA) and Lukasz Dutka (Cyfronet – Gredia Grid project).

A TG8 website (wiki) and mailing lists have been established to support collaboration between TG8 participants.

The TG8 kick-off meeting took place in January 2007 in Sankt Augustin (Germany). A list of six topics has been identified, leading to six TG8 actions with a clearly identified action leader:

1.    VO classification & VO architecture & VO models - Lukasz Dutka (Cyfronet – Gredia)
2.    Policy in VO (intersection with TG6) - Alvaro Arenas (STFC – GridTrust/CoreGRID)
3.    VO use cases (scenario, methodology,...) and requirements - Bernd Scheuermann (SAP – XtreemOS)
4.    VO & contracts & SLA - Kostas Stathis (Royal Holloway, University of London – ArguGRID)
5.    Manageability of VO - Nikos Parlavantzas (INRIA – Grid4All)
6.    VO & ontologies/semantics -  leader not appointed yet

Another TG8 session was organized on September 27th, 2007 in the framework of the European Services, Software and Grid Technology Days (Brussels, Belgium). The work progress on the various topics that were identified during the TG8 kick-off meeting was reported during the session: VO classification, architecture and models, policy in VO (in intersection with TG6 on security), VO use cases and requirements, VO contracts and SLA, manageability of VO.