Joining a Virtual Organisation
Your grid certificate identifies you to the grid as an individual user, but it's not enough on its own to allow you to use grid resources; you also need to join a Virtual Organisation (VO). These are essentially just user groups - typically one per experiment - and individual Resource Centres (RCs) can choose to support work by users of a particular VO. Most RCs support the four VOs associated with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. The sign-up procedure varies from VO to VO. UK-based VOs typically require a manual approval step, while LHC VOs require an active CERN account. If you are already part of an experiment that is represented by a VO, they should provide you with any specific instructions you need to join.
If you're interesting in using the grid but are not (yet) working as part of
a user community already represented by a VO, worry not.
GridPP have created a catch-all VO - gridpp.
| Your user community may already have a VO associated with it. Check the GridPP wiki page of supported VOs to see if you can join that to speed things up. |
Joining an incubator VO
| Some users have reported that the VOMS registration described below fails using the Safari web browser. We have tried and tested the process using Mozilla Firefox. |
| Please ignore any "untrusted connection" warnings when accessing the VOMS server pages. GridPP is aware that the VOMS server uses unsigned certificates, but this situation is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. |
Joining the GridPP VO
To join the
gridpp VO, visit
this page
using a browser that has your grid certificate installed
and follow the instructions.
| Your VO membership request needs to be confirmed manually by one of the VO administrators, so please wait for the membership confirmation email to arrive before proceeding. You may wish to keep an eye on your junk folder(s) too. |
Once you have joined a VO, congratulations - you are ready to start using the grid!