Bringing it together: Bandwidth on Demand and Virtual Organisations

TrackTrack 1 (Auditorium 1)
DescriptionSince December 2008, SURFnet’s Dynamic Lightpath service is running as a production-grade Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) service for users within the Netherlands. We have promoted the use of this service, among others by organizing contests for researchers. From these contests we have learned which factors are important for the uptake. Obviously, BoD is typically needed for connecting (Grid) computing, storage and/or other resources. Furthermore, the (scientific) users of this combined infrastructure collaborate in Virtual Organizations distributed over many institutions.
Providing the bandwidth alone is thus not enough since much of the complexity and challenges are found at the endpoints; an integrated approach, in collaboration with organizations such as the computing center SARA and the Dutch National Grid Initiative (BigGrid), to ensure ease of use is therefore very important.
 
In the presentation we would like to show a number of use cases for BoD and how we have organized the collaboration with e-Infrastructure partners (SARA and BiG Grid) to support them. Furthermore, we will relate these use cases to the work we have done to support the OGF’s Network Service Interface specification and to SURFnet’s federated identity and group management framework OPENconext. This framework provides authenticated users the capability to define user groups - in essence this is the building block for the creation of virtual organizations, allowing groups of users to share a set of applications and resources. We will extend OPENconext with an elaborate policy framework suited to deal with resource and network management. Advantages are that SURFnet users will be able to add BoD services in the same environment that also supports their existing collaborations and other e-Infrastructure resources.

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