Visualizing topology in self-organizing management overlays

With the desire towards ad-hoc collaboration across organizations, specifically fostered by grids, static, well-known and preconfigured management topologies are becoming hard to maintain. Dynamic topology creation and exploration is needed when new collaborations are established. Topology across organizational domain is also called management overlay. Algorithms are needed that can self-organize topology, as well as algorithms that can render and update the layout for visualizing topology information presenting management information on operator consoles. Changes constantly occurring in an ad-hoc topology need to be updated and presented accordingly. We discuss ad-hoc topologies and impact on management systems. Our work is based on experiments with various algorithms with self-organizing capabilities and hyperbolic visualization techniques for visualizing ad-hoc topologies for management overlays.