How does an individual or a community gain access to the e-infrastructure provided by EGEE? Primarily, what are the processes that they need to follow, and the criteria that will be applied to their requests for resources?

Overview
Within EGEE, user communities are organised on the basis of Virtual Organisations (VO). An individual can only use resources if they are a member of a virtual organisation. It is the VO that is enabled to use a resource and restrictions can be placed on which individuals or groups/roles within a VO can gain access to a resource. Many resources of varying types can be hosted by each Resource Centre (RC). Not all VOs are enabled on all resources at all Resource Centres. Indeed, it is expected that a VO will bring resources from within its own community to connect to and form part of the EGEE infrastructure, thus increasing the total pool of resources available.  Resource Centres and regions are encouraged to allocate a small percentage of their resources to new VOs to help boost the community onto the e-Infrastructure.

Seed Resources
To speed up this process further, in EGEE-III a small set of dedicated ‘seed’ resources, in addition to the regional ‘seed’ resources, have been set up for use by new VOs during their start-up phase. These resources are limited and it is expected that these new VOs will rapidly migrate away from the seed resources, freeing them up for the next users. A VO may request access to seed resources through the CIC Operations portal during the VO registration process. For more information see the Access to Seed Resources policy document: https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/EGEE/AccessToSeedResources

Resource Allocation Lifetime
Storage and compute resources located at an RC are not only needed by a VO when they start up, but throughout their lifetime. The same procedure can be used by VO’s to negotiate for additional resources from willing RCs for long-term use, or to provide short-term access to support dedicated campaigns for specific applications. The procedure for how an RC joins the EGEE infrastructure is outlined in this PDF document (228 Ko).

Policy
Operationally, the policy for ‘matchmaking’ between VOs and RCs is defined by the Resource Allocation Group which:

• Maintains policies relating to VO registration;
• Organises, allocates and manages the central seed-resources;
• Provides a scalable model that can match small and large VO’s to resources (seed, permanent, campaign) and facilities for their core infrastructure services;
• Monitors and reports on the allocation process and usage of all central and regional seed resources.

During this process EGEE takes no view on the scientific merits of the VO - its activity and applications – as it is up to the RC to agree to the use of its resources by the VO. If the members of the VO wish to integrate their own resources into EGEE (and enable their VO on these resources) the relationship between the VO and the RC is direct. It is up to the RC and the VO to decide if these resources should join those generally available within EGEE for any member of the VO, or to be restricted to only specific members of the VO.

Starting a Virtual Organisation (VO)
To start a new Virtual Organisation (VO), you as the VO manager must fill in the VO Registration Form. You must have a grid certificate to access and submit this form. The approval process takes a minimum of three business days. After that the minimum VO services must be deployed; EGEE can help deploy the core services. For advice on creating a new VO, please contact the VO Support Team.
To provide resources, please see the EGEE Operations Group's information for resource centers. Note that each virtual organization is expected to integrate computational resources into the EGEE infrastructure generally equivalent to its average consumption, although this can be relaxed in exceptional circumstances

Contact us
For more information, contact Application Identification & Support.