(Joint work with Carl Kesselman, USC/ISI)
The term virtual organization (VO), when used to denote a dynamic collection of individuals, institutions, and resources united by some common interest or task, has emerged as a popular, and presumably useful, organizing principle in distributed systems. It is common to see systems being deployed to support one or more VOs, policies may be expressed in terms of VOs, and services are required to support the creation and evolution of VOs.
Unfortunately, the popularity of the term has led to a lack of clarity in its meaning: at the limit, a VO could variously denote a multi-decadal scientific collaboration, a commercial outsourcing relationship, a weblog, or an email exchange between two individuals. Yet presumably these different scenarios vary greatly in their requirements for IT infrastructure support, security, reliability, performance, cost, and so on, and may benefit from different technical solutions. This lack of clarity hinders both communication and the identification of required tools.
Thus, we seek in this talk to clarify the VO concept and its implications for distributed system implementation--to define a "sociology of the grid."