Speakers
Dr
Flavia Donno
(CERN)Dr
Marco Verlato
(INFN Padova)
Description
The organization and management of the user support in a global e-science computing
infrastructure such as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) is one of the
challenges of the grid. Given the widely distributed nature of the organization, and
the spread of expertise for installing, configuring, managing and troubleshooting the
grid middleware services, a standard centralized model could not be deployed in WLCG.
We therefore have a central coordination model with distributed expertise and
support, able to provide solutions for thousands of grid users and administrators
with capacity for up to thousands requests per week. Problem reports can be submitted
either through a central portal or using the regional support centers. The central
infrastructure has been interfaced to the regional units to allow requests to flow in
both directions from centre to region and vice versa. A first line support team
provides support for generic grid problems while specialized units answer to
middleware, deployment, network, other grid infrastructures and virtual organization
specific problems. Furthermore, regional centers provide support for local site
problems. Whenever the expertise is missing at a regional center, the problem can be
forwarded to the central system for solving or forwarding to an appropriate
specialist. The system plays a great role in daily operations support and therefore
it is interfaced to the grid Core Infrastructure Center (CIC) for grid monitoring and
specific virtual organization information.
The central portal provides a set of useful services such as a collection of up to
date and useful documents, a facility for problem report browsing, a powerful search
engine, e-mail access, and hot-line service. Tutorials for users and supporters are
organized regularly by the support training service.
In this paper we describe the model and general infrastructure of the Global Grid
User Support and provide results from experience with statistics on the operation of
the service.
Primary author
Dr
Flavia Donno
(CERN)
Co-authors
Dr
Alistair Mills
(CERN)
Gilles Mathieu
(IN2P3/CNRS)
Helmut Dres
(Forschungzentrum Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe - Germany)
Dr
Marco Verlato
(INFN Padova)
Min Tsai
(Acatemia Sinica, Tapei – Taiwan)
Dr
Torsten Antoni
(Forschungzentrum Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe - Germany)
