NA3: User Community Support Team Steve Brewer Chief Community Officer 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

Overview Introduction Goal Structure User Helpdesk User Support Teams User Support Requests Technical Services New and Existing Users Support Process User Support Teams Provide Next steps…

What is the goal of User Community Support? 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

What is the goal of User Community Support? The goal of NA3: User Community Coordination is to bring significant numbers of new user from a broader range of communities to the European E-Infrastructure over the next four years by guiding the evolution of the E-Infrastructure to the needs of this growing user community. 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

How will the User Community Coordination Work Package achieve this? Achieving the goal How will the User Community Coordination Work Package achieve this? Talking to user communities (VRC agreements) Disseminating success stories (Inspired newsletter), web…) Help and support channels Communication and collaboration with NGIs and others Core technical services for users 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

Organisational overview EGI-InSPIRE is a four year project which lays down the EGI operational and support processes and defines a framework for EGI which is sustainable and independent from project cycles 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

Organisation simplified We are implementing a small number of coordinated and cohesive services in order to simplify the logical structure of EGI as experienced by both users and partners 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

The Amsterdam Team The User Community Coordination team (NL): Steve Brewer (UCST coordination) Gergely Sipos (UCST, NGI coordination) Karolis Eigelis (UCST) Nuno Ferreira (UCST) Plus: Marios Chatziangelou (Technical Services coordination) (GR) coordinating teams in Greece, Edinburgh, Spain and Portugal 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

The route to self-sustainability “In order to define what services EGI User Support should provide, we must know what services users need to be able to become confident and autonomous communities on the infrastructure.” – D3.1 User Community Support Processes 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

User Community Support Team The User & Community Support Team (UCST) will be involved in delivering: Documentation: check complete and matches (new) users experiences Training: direct new users to the training opportunities (grid schools, online, national sessions) Consulting for New Communities: assess needs of new communities then redirect to VRC, SSC or NGI consulting services. Application Porting Support: coord. capabilities provided within the NGIs, VRCs or by partner projects Requirements Gathering: build relationships with the VRC contacts (meetings) Infrastructure Planning: users reqs. coordinated within EGI.eu management bodies Resource Allocation: Brokering requests from new communities 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

Consulting : new communities Identifying, contacting and meeting new communities: EGI Technical and User Forums Specialist events: HPC, Grid, standards, DCI… Discipline events: Life Sciences, Social Sciences & Humanities VRC recognition Development of MOUs Integration of infrastructure resources Requirements capture Matchmaking between new, existing and refactored applications from amongst the EGI community 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

Virtual Research Communities Benefits of VRC membership: VRCs can access computing, data storage and other types of resource made available by EGI stakeholders. The user support units of the NGIs and EGI.eu help VRC members during the routine usage of the systems and provide assistance... VRCs will have the ability to establish their own Virtual Organisations (VOs) as collections of hardware, software and human resources. NGIs provide trainers and technology specialists to support them during the integration and adaptation of their legacy applications & datasets VRCs can influence the evolution of EGI’s services through representation in the User Community Board and the User Support Advisory Group. VRC discussion session at 16:00 – 17:30 this afternoon 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

NGI User Support Teams The NGIs contribute effort to distributed user-support teams. These are brought together as support units within the EGI Helpdesk and provide: Consulting for New Communities; Application Database: NGIs will pass on ported applications to benefit other users and user communities. Documentation: NGI experts will contribute new documentation as new technologies and procedures become available. Training: will provide link between EGI training coordination and national training resources. Portals and Science Gateways: NGI expert will be available for consultancy (eg. provision of web-based technologies to access DCI platforms.) Dashboards: VO Dashboards used to validate sites. NGI expertise will assist VOs in developing tests supported by SA3. Application Porting Support: NGI experts will be available Resource Allocation: Responding to requests for access to resources 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

Technical Services Technical services: Training Events Calendar of training events available to all infrastructure providers and technologies.  Training Repository Central point for the training material from EGI community Applications Database A catalogue of all applications that have been ported or are being ported within the infrastructure VO Services VOMS and the VO database & registration services - through basic portal infrastructure based on established technology and ‘dashboard’ infrastructure where the status of the resource fabric being used by a particular VO will be reported upon. 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

Support: structure & context G I. e u User Forum ESFRI Project Users VOs Virtual Research Communities User Community Board External Projects International User Communities User Services Advisory Group User Community Coordination Operations Coordination NGI Support Teams Technical User & Community Support Team Operational Tools Operations Services for Heavy Users NGI Helpdesk EGI Helpdesk User Requests External Relations Shared services and tools for High Energy Physics for Earth Science for Astronomy & Astrophysics for Life Science Provisioning the Software Infrastructure 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

Support requests: simplified EGI.eu webpage Answer Tickets EGI.eu User Support Team Delegate Tickets External Projects Submit Requests Delegate Tickets User Requests GGUS e-mail or Portal interface NGIs User Support Teams and Support units of community and technology specific teams Receive Answers Other interfaces to GGUS 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

Support skills required NGI & EGI.eu Community Support teams Consultancy Training Porting scientific applications Accessing scientific applications Virtual Organization Support Development of new software services Collecting Feedback Documentation Helpdesk Community integration A spectrum of skills will be required from both the EGI UCST and also from our partners though the NGI effort UCST will advertise requirements identified as being needed by the user communities 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010

Next steps: Summary of what we have achieved: Next steps: Local staff recruited, partner staff identified core services established Main processes defined (meetings, mail lists) Draft agreements ready (TORs, MOUs…) Next steps: Establish first few VRCs (road test MOUs) Establish regular communication with NGIs (low s/n) Initiate requirements gathering process (triage) Initiate iterative design process for support (RAD) 12/09/2010 EGI Technical Forum 2010