Speaker
Printable Summary
In moving towards a sustainable infrastructure, IBERGRID seeks increased users both by local communities and by general international users. Such goals can only be achieved by improving the satisfaction of users by providing them mechanisms and tools they need ofr their research activities. Simultaneously, such mechanisms and tools have also to be provided with a scope to make them easy for adoption by both current and new user communities, with minimum interference on their research activities. This talk presents the efforts developed by the Portuguese and Spanish user support teams during the last year, awarded with important achievements such as a huge increase of the regional communities activities, where one of the Iberian Virtual Organizations reached EGI top-10 since January 2012, and by a very sustainable participation of local Iberian researchers in major international research projects, not only in High Energy Physics but also in other multidisciplinary domains.
Description of the work
During the last year, IBERGRID has put in place a set of strategies and tools to serve the user needs, based on two main branches: "enhancement of user activities" and "enhancement of user support". The "enhancement of user activities" focus in providing the necessary information to the user so that he is empowered to take decisions. In this sense, sites have been classified in terms of the computing and storage capabilities they offer. This will allow users to know what to expect at each site, and to redirect their tasks to sites which, by configuration, offer more dedicated resources. On the other hand, a pilot infrastructure based on DIRAC is currently being tested which will allow to decrease the barriers of current and future users in using the infrastructure.
The "enhancement of the user support" focus on providing the proper structure to the current support activities. User support shifts are focused on serving users sending their questions via a recently deployed RT regional helpdesk. The user support teams have at their disposal a wide set of VO monitoring tools, like a VO SAM connected to a VO Operational Dashboard, and a VO Admin Dashboard that works as an aggregator of relevant VO information. Such tools allow shifters to take the decision if the issue is an operation problems or a misuse of the user. The RT regional helpdesk is connected to GGUS which provides the functionality to redirect user complains to sites, if at the end the problems can only be solved by the sites operational team. These are just two concrete examples of the efforts in place but many other implemented and on-going processes will be presented and discussed during the talk.
Wider impact of this work
The IBERIAN strategies in place have as ultimate goal the fostering of the regional infrastructure usage. A very important effort has been made to boost the research activities in the region, but the most important challenge is to provide the necessary conditions so that researchers maintain a sustainable and continue activity. In this sense, we will also present, share and discuss our plans on how preserve the researchers we currently gained during the last year, being able to correspond to their expectations and challenges imposed to the user support and infrastructure managers almost on a daily basis.
