Virtual Organization (VO)

The IT infrastructure in DRIHM is provisioned as a Grid, a system that "coordinates resources that are not subject to centralized control, using standard, open, general-purpose protocols and interfaces to deliver nontrivial qualities of service".

A Grid's resources are provided by different real organisations that provide their resources to one or multiple Virtual Organisations (VO). A VO is a "group of researchers with similar scientific interests and requirements, who are able to work collaboratively with other members and/or share resources (e.g. data, software, expertise, CPU, storage space), regardless of geographical location". The DRIHM VO is composed of different groups of users, HMR researchers, public organizations and "citizen scientists", interested in HMR and related Earth science disciplines. From the set of resources that exist in a Grid, a previously negotiated subset is provided to such a VO.

Figure 1 illustrates a fictitious but typical Grid. It exemplary depicts six real organisations, which provide several resources, to two VOs, i.e. "Chemistry" and "Physics". Additionally, an exemplary usage policy for the resources provided by the Storage-Company is described at the bottom of Figure 1. For identification, the de-facto standard in Grids is the so-called x.509 certificate, in this document also referred as "Grid certificate". This certificate is used by several security concepts and tools, e.g., grid-proxy-init or GSI-SSH Term, a Grid-specific SSH client.

Details about the DRIHM VO can be found here.

VOMS/VOMRS

For the management of the VO members, there is a dedicated service called Virtual Organization Management Service (VOMS). This service stores information about the members, e.g., basic information like the DN, or roles within the VO. Such a service provides a graphical (web) interface for management, e.g., adding and removing members to or from the VO or assigning certain roles to a member in the context of the VO. Additionally, it provides an interface that can be used by Grid resources or application to query about the current user, e.g., whether the provided DN is a member of the VO or if it holds a certain role. To ease the registration process for users and to store additional information, like the email address or VO specific information, there is an additional Virtual Organisation Management Registration Service (VOMRS), which extends the VOMS service by additional data fields or a user interface. Just like the AAI, VOMS and VOMRS are basic services within a Grid.

 Services in the EGCF testbed

These services are provided in the EGCF testbed by Dortmund, who provide a graphical web interface for the VOMS service at https://vomrs01.grid.tu-dortmund.de:8443/vomrs/DRIHM/vomrs, and the VOMRS service at https://vomrs01.grid.tu-dortmund.de:8443/voms/DRIHM/.

Services in EGI 

https://vomsmania.cnaf.infn.it:8443/voms/drihm.eu/