NA4: User Community Support and Expansion NA4 Status Report

EGEE-III INFSO-RI-222667

Enabling Grids for E-sciencE

www.eu-egee.org

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C. LoomisNA4 Activity ManagerCNRS/LAL

EGEE-III First Review, 24-25 June, 2009

NA4: User Community Support and ExpansionNA4 Status Report


EGEE-III INFSO-RI-222667 NA4 - C. Loomis - EGEE-III First Review 24-25 June 2009 2

DELETE SLIDE ON SUBMISSION• Put your name and presentation title on the first slide

– See the meeting agenda• Insert your activity and name into the footer• Complete the activity overview slide (next slide)

– the activity statistics - geographical, budget proportion, effort distribution between partners

• Structure your slides & presentation time with:– 50%: Goals and achievements of the activity:

Pictures showing metrics are better than slides of bullet points Mention key tasks within the activity

• i.e. What’s done, how managed, lead partner, involved partners, ...– 10%: Any deviations from the workplan in year I - if there were any!– 20%: Any issues and how they have been addressed– 15%: Plans for Y2 – broader EGI transition issues dealt elsewhere– 5%: Summary slide highlighting the achievements & proposed solutions to

any issues requiring resolution This slide to be left up during Q & A



Activity Overview



Utilization



Tasks• TNA4.1: Support

– Virtual Organization Support– Application Porting Support– Direct User Support

• TNA4.2: Strategic Discipline Clusters– High Energy Physics– Life Sciences– Earth Sciences– Grid Observatory– Computational Chemistry– Astronomy & Astrophysics– Fusion

• TNA4.3: Activity Coordination– Activity Management– Regional Coordination



Virtual Organization Support• VO Management Developments

– The purpose of this task is to enhance existing tools for develop new tools to aid the VO managers. The work concentrated on three tasks: improving the VO registration information, integration of collaborative tools (mailing lists, chat, etc.) with VO membership information, and expansion of the SAM (Service Availability Monitoring) testing framework for non-LHC VOs. Prototypes of all have been produced in the first year and the work will focus on putting these into production for the second year.

• Documentation and Support Provision– The purpose of this task was to improve the organization and availability of

documentation for VO managers and to provide support for them. Links to relevant documentation have been gathered on the NA4 TWiki page for VO support. In addition, the team acted as a liaison between the biomed VO and operations in a case where a site manager did not feel the biomed VO managers acted quickly enough regarding a possible security problem on a site. The result was improved communication channels and clearer understanding of the VO manager responsibilities.

• VO Tools Identification– This task is to identify missing tools or missing functionality that prevent VO managers

from efficiently managing their VO. Problems were identified with VOMS functionality and these were transmitted to the appropriate developers. In addition, members in this team worked with the JSPG on changes to policies related to VO management.



Application Porting Support• Consultancy and Porting

– The purpose of this task is to provide direct help with porting applications to the grid. As it can be seen on the porting group webpage, the porting group has ported around 15 applications since the start of the project and there are about 10 currently being ported.

• Training– In this task, the members of the application-porting group collect, prepare, reorganize training

materials and offer those as customized training packages for clients. Besides this personalized training, members of the group were involved in EGEE training events and presented application porting specific sessions at various courses. We see an increase in the number of events with APS team members’ involved. We consider this as a positive feedback as it clearly shows that NA3 considers that having APS members contributing to training is useful.

• Provision of Infrastructure Services– The group leader is the VO manager for the NA4 VO (na4.vo.eu-egee.org). The NA4 VO provides

an infrastructure for both people who are involved in application porting and communities who recently ported applications to EGEE and do not yet have their own VOs. Because the NA4 APS team have full control over this VO, it is much more convenient to use for porting than other VOs. The team also maintains the application repository. The Application Database will surely become an important service for the project, so its proper operation is crucial for the whole community.

• Public Relations– The success of the porting activity and EGEE itself highly depends on how many and what type of

potential grid users we reach. Porting groups write technical-PR descriptions about every ported application. We believe that these stories published on the porting webpage attract people’s attention and are found to be both convincing and useful.



Direct User Support• Ticket Handling

– The DUS unit has been included as a separate support team in the GGUS ticket handling system since mid-September. Since that time, the team members have worked on two-person, two-week shifts dealing with user tickets related to documentation. Unfortunately, the number of tickets assigned to this unit has been small.

• Documentation and Use Cases– The DUS team has been reviewing and assessing existing documentation, as

well as writing new documentation to fill identified gaps. The DUS team has also been working with various scientific clusters and other teams to improve their documentation. The group is now in the process of uploading documents and Use Cases to the DUS subversion repository and will make them more widely available shortly.

• EGEE-User Interactions– The team should design and implement novel methods for EGEE-User

interaction in order to make it easier for users to get help. Two suggestions were to provide an “office hours” service via a chat server and to produce some webcasts of common use cases. However, both ideas have struck some technical difficulties and nothing has been produced to date.



High Energy Physics• Many of the most important, generic tools have

originated in this cluster: AMGA metadata catalog, Ganga/Diane job management system, and the Dashboard. Although these were all created to fill needs within the high-energy physics community, they have been useful to many other communities. This cluster is a good example of cross-discipline collaboration.



Life Sciences• This cluster spans a wide range of different disciplines

and a correspondingly wide range of application requirements. In the face of these diverse and difficult requirements, the cluster has worked to ensure that appropriate services exist, providing the Medical Data Manager and MOTEUR among others. At the same time, users in this area run some of the largest and most scientifically successful calculations on the grid.



Earth Sciences• The dissemination activities undertaken by this cluster

have greatly increased the visibility of grid technology within the earth science community, showing directly that grid technology can produce exciting scientific results. This recognition has allowed the Earth Science cluster to become the core of the nascent Earth Science SSC for EGI.



Grid Observatory• This cluster has collected information about the use

and performance of the various production grid services and made that information available to the computer science community for analysis. In so doing, the cluster has created a bridge between EGEE and the computer science community, filling a gap in our coverage of scientific disciplines.



Computational Chemistry• This cluster is on the vanguard of using licensed

software on the EGEE grid infrastructure. They have used several different models in production (package-based VOs, fine-grained access control via VOMS, and license servers) and provide the best real world experience with the benefits and problems of each model.



Astronomy & Astrophysics• This cluster has done a tremendous job in identifying

potential new users, ensuring that they are trained, and converting those users into regular users of the grid infrastructure. Most encouraging is that most of these users receive no funding and continue to use the grid because it provides a valuable service.



Fusion• This cluster has ported a large number of fusion

applications to the EGEE grid infrastructure, showing the utility of grid computing for fusion research. Application requirements force this cluster to consider supercomputing, grid, and desktop resources, putting this cluster on the leading edge of transparently combining these different resources.



Activity Coordination• Activity Management• Regional Coordination



RESPECT• Recommended External Software for EGEE

CommuniTies– GridWay Metascheduler– P-GRADE Portal– Ganga– DIANE– I2glogin– GRelC– Instrument Element– Virtual Control Room– Migrating Desktop– G-Eclipse– StoRM



User Forum• 18 demos• 37 posters• 101 oral presentations• (plot with comparisons with past User Forums)• Agenda

– http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=40435 • Book of Abstracts

– http://edms.cern.ch/some_url

http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=40435

http://edms.cern.ch/some_url



Transition to EGI• Few structural changes:

– NA4 Steering Committee User Forum Steering Committee– Strategic Discipline Clusters Specialized Support Centers

• Major changes:– SSCs must be much more autonomous.– SSCs must drive use of grid within their user communities.



Deviations from Work Plan• Support

– Lower expenditures than planned.– Linked to low visibility and underutilization.

• Strategic Discipline Clusters– Higher expenditures than planned.– Expect rate to continue and to become additional unfunded

contributions.• Cross-Activity Tasks

– Accounting for a large fraction of expended effort.



Summary• User Community

– 13000 users, 112 registered VOs– Majority of use from 20 core VOs– Overall use increased by factor of 2.

• Three principal tasks of NA4 have worked well:– Support– Strategic Support Clusters– Activity Coordination

• Scientific impact seen at User Forum 4 in Catania.– 18 demos– 37 posters– 101 presentations

NA4: User Community Support and Expansion NA4 Status Report

Documents

Transcript of NA4: User Community Support and Expansion NA4 Status Report