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NGI International Task Review MS109 Latvia

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This page contains the assessment of the NGI International Task at year 1 of the EGI-InSPIRE project (one page per NGI). The NGI representatives are required to fill the tables according to the required information. The content will be integral part of the EGI-InSPIRE milestone MS109 "NGI International Task Review"

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User Services

Human Services (Table 1)

Table 1: NGI Assessment: User Services >> Human Services
EGI-InSPIRE EGI_DS Name Assessment Score How to Improve
NA3.3N U-N-3 U-N-13 Requirements Gathering There is no structured or formally operational system for gathering and processing requirements of a local scale. There are no plans to deploy one by own means. Due to relatively small national research community as a whole, requirements of user communities are gathered during direct contacts and evaluated on individual basis. Formal local system would not be sustainable considering small amount of research groups and necessary operational effort overhead. Besides direct contact, Instant Messaging & VoIP (Skype, Jabber) as well as email communications are used, including national grid user mailing list. So far the required features for some user communities were approved and implemented in few selected Latvian NGI sites only. 3 Global requirements submission and processing system could be useful (keeping it non-mandatory), especially one allowing to exchange requirements experience between similar user communities in different NGIs. NGIs should be allowed to keep existing approach of maintaining communications with user communities directly, but the global requirements system should be available for NGI input to propogate these requirements. In case the original NGI of the requesting user community is unable to fulfill the requirements, other NGIs could voluntarily step in and offer necessary resources to these research groups.

Also, greater oppourtunities and financing should be provided for user community members to participate in global EGI User Forum events to exchange ideas on necessary requirements as well as success stories.

NA3.3N U-N-14 U-N-15 Application Database Currently Latvian NGI has not exported any package information to AppDB and is not using any information from it either. Most user communities in Latvian NGI use either their own custom-tailored experiment-specific software, which does not provide reasonable re-usability for other communities, or licensed commercial software like ANSYS, Matlab or GAMESS is run using the licenses available to specific communities, thus these software packages cannot be exported to AppDB as generally available. The use of AppDB in Latvian NGI has not been widespread also due to lack of real use cases when local user communities approach NGI "empty-handed", i.e. - without already working custom-made or commercial/open-source software. Currently, all user communities are under scenario of upscaling their computations from local clusters. In case some generic open-souce software will be used in the future by some research community, it will be exported to AppDB. Also, Latvian NGI needs to convince many user communities that sharing their custom-tailored tools will actually benefit them, since for many of these resarch groups these custom tools are the essence of their expert know-how and ensures they have unique knowledge that is valuable for quality publications. 2 More effort is necessary to try and migrate several user communities from commercial or own custom-written software to generic reusable open-source packages from AppDB. Also, user communities have to be persuaded that publishing and sharing their long-term inhouse developed tools will benefit them and not steal their unique know-how and academic value.
NA3.3N U-N-16 U-N-17 Training Training is organised on request by individual user comunities. Such current system is sustainable. There are no regularly scheduled (i.e. monthly, annual) mandatory training events, nor are any planned. No e-training is available, nor is one planned by local means. Due to small available effort to this task and small user community, the e-training material would require either too much overhead to keep up-to date, or due to very infrequent usage of those tools (when new user group joins) it would constantly be out-of-date. 3 Migration of several sites to desktop-grid compatible ARC/Condor middleware is expected within PQ4 to significantly improve amount of available automated tools for user communities, as well as offer re-usable training and more seamless upscaling from using local Condor based clusters and desktop grids to NGI and EGI scale grid computing. No e-courses or national training events planned (would be inefficient).
NA3.3N U-N-12 U-N-18 U-N-19 Consultancy Due to small number of research communities, highly interactive consultancy is provided to these communities. Consultancy, similarly as training, is mainly provided through direct contact local meetings, phone conferences and Instant Messaging (Skype or Jabber). In case none of previous are available, a slower approach of using problem-specific or general grid user mailing lists is employed. The current system works well and is sustainable. No formal helpdesk and request tracking system is planned, and it would not be sustainable. 4 In the future a possible online archive (FAQ, Wiki or forum) would be usefull for new users who stumble across previously discussed problems. Ideally, such local user support/consultancy resource should be hosted in local language. The main issue to resolve and decide, as in any knowledge dissemination system, is whether to deploy a more interactive and low-latency solution as forum, which has the downside of accumulating a lot of out-dated and version specific info over long-term, or providing less interactive service such as Wiki that has latest current information. A good compromise to provide both low latency response as well as exclude out-of-date info storage could also be user mailing list + Wiki.

Operations Services

Human Services (Table 2)

Table 2: NGI Assessment: Operations Services >> Human Services
EGI-InSPIRE EGI_DS Name Assessment Score How to Improve
SA1.4N O-N-9 Requirements Gathering Since there are currently only three sites in Latvian NGI, no specific requirements gathering task/service is necessary. Two of the sites and site admin are in the same building as NGI staff, the third site is also in the same city. Thus, site admins use local communications to discuss requirements with NGI staff. Requirements arise from daily operations and, if necessary, are propagated through NGI staff to OMB meetings. 4 Specific training about EMI middleware and its detailed architecture / possibilities should be provided to site admins, since feedback on service level improvements can be provided only in case of deep knowledge and expertise on grid middleware internals.
SA1.1N O-N-9 Operations Coordination write here 0-5 write here
SA1.2N O-N-9 Security write here 0-5 write here

Infrastructure Services (Table 3)

Table 3: NGI Assessment: Operations Services >> Infrastructure Services
EGI-InSPIRE EGI_DS Name Assessment Score How to Improve
SA1.3N O-N-9 Software Rollout write here 0-5 write here
SA1.4N O-N-3 Monitoring write here 0-5 write here
SA1.5N O-N-2 Accounting write here 0-5 write here
SA1.4N O-N-1 O-N-4 Configuration Repository and Operations Portal write here 0-5 write here
SA1.6N SA1.7N O-N-6 O-N-7 Helpdesk write here 0-5 write here
SA1.8N O-N-5 O-N-8 Core Services write here 0-5 write here

Other (Table 4)

Table 4: NGI Assessment: Other
EGI-InSPIRE EGI_DS Name Assessment Score How to Improve
NA2.3N Policy Development write here 0-5 write here
NA2.2N E-N-2 Dissemination write here 0-5 write here