A brief VO overview

Lisa Childers, 7 July 2006

Due to the ubiquitity of reliable networking and other technological advances, scientific research is becoming less isolated and increasingly collaborative. It is an exciting time, as today's scientists are able to address problems of unprecedented complexity. Some examples include:

The Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG), with a mission to speed the creation of innovative approaches to cancer treatment and prevention
The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), with a mission to improve predictive understanding of earthquake phenomena
The ATLAS Experiment, with a mission to better understand the fundamental nature of matter

These multi-institutional collaborations, consisting of people sharing resources and operating in a coordinated way in pursuit of common goals, form virtual organizations (VOs) in order to do their work. The creation and support of VOs is a problem fundamental to Grid Computing.

Key characteristics of Virtual Organizations

Distributed resources and people
Linked by networks, crossing administritive domains
Sharing resources, common goals
Dynamic
Fault tolerant