Technical support for Life Sciences communities on a production grid infrastructure

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Information Science
• Bioinformatics

Background:

• Large-scale distributed computing infrastructures (DCI) require substantial human intervention for operational quality.
• Existing application execution environments often prioritize fault-tolerance over incident resolution, demanding significant manpower.
• Sustained quality of service for Virtual Organisations (VOs) necessitates long-term support strategies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe the establishment and operation of a technical support team for the biomed VO.
• To detail the organization, tools, daily tasks, and procedures of this support team.
• To analyze the impact of the support team on resource usage, incident management, and tool development.

Main Methods:

• Formation of a dedicated technical support team within the biomed VO.
• Development and implementation of specific organizational structures, tooling, and daily procedures.
• Monitoring and analysis of end-user resource utilization, reported incidents, and created software tools.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated improvements in resource usage by end users.
• Quantification of the number of reported incidents managed by the support team.
• Development of specialized software tools to aid support operations.

Conclusions:

• A dedicated technical support team is an effective model for ensuring sustained quality of service in distributed computing environments for VOs.
• The biomed VO's experience provides a framework for measuring support impact and reducing human costs.
• Future work should focus on community-specific support models and further cost-efficiency measures.