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

2. 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…

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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. Support: structure & contextG 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

16. Support requests: simplified
EGI.eu
webpage
Answer Tickets
EGI.eu User Support Team
Delegate Tickets
External
Projects
Submit Requests
Delegate Tickets
User Requests
GGUS 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

17. 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

18. 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