Virtual Organization Management over Collaborative Awareness Model (CAM) Manuel Salvadores 1,2 PhD student msalvadores@gmail.com Pilar Herrero 1 supervisor pherrero@fi.upm.es 1 Facultad de Inform´atica. Universidad Polit´ ecnica de Madrid 2 ECS , University of Southampton, UK September 3, 2007 Abstract Grid Computing environments are mainly created to lead the shared use of different resources based on business needs. How these resources are shared in terms of CPU cycles, storage ca- pacity, software licenses, ... is normally established by the availability of these resources out of the local administration context. This paper presents a Cooperative/Collaborative Aware- ness Model (CAM) to manage Virtual Organizations in Grid Computing environments. CAM applies some theoretical principles of multi-agents systems, awareness models and third party collaborations to promote a set of key concepts in order to manage Virtual Organizations. Other solutions relies on technical software packages to provide same kind on features. Rather than this approximation CAM relies on a model providing more functionalities and giving more flexibility. 1 Introduction Resource providing and usage is settled by policy rules.Some challenging questions are What are the terms over which I am going to leave others to use my resources?, What are the conditions to use third parties computational power? Grid Computing gathers the solutions to these questions around the concept of Virtual Organization. A Virtual Organization is a widely spread concept used in several fields of Computer Science (e.g. Agents Collaboration and Negotiation protocols, Collaborative Tools and Social Networks). In our case the field is Distributed Systems and being more precisely Grid Computing. Therefore the term Virtual Organization is introduced from the point of view of Grid Computing even tough some similarities with other fields are inherited. Going backwards to the beginning of the Grid, before the term Virtual Organization was linked to Grid Computing, the Grid was simply understood as a way to give transparent access to the users in order to use some resources [17]. Nowadays this definition matches almost every distributed system. Six years later Fosters definition is, once more, abstract: 1