VO Services

Introduction

Users of the European Grid Infrastructure are organised into Virtual Organisations (VO). A VO is a group of people who share similar interests, have similar goals, and need to work collaboratively sharing resources (e.g. data, software, expertise, CPU, storage space) regardless of their geographical location. There are already more than 200 VOs hosted on EGI. Users are invited to join these VOs, or establish new ones for their own communities.

Setting up and operating a VO is a complex task that requires an important effort for ensuring a high quality of services. Many tools and services are available in EGI that rely on the VO information, and sometimes, procedures are neither easily available nor complete. The EGI VO Services subtask aims at supporting VOs in the whole process of start-up, management and operation, pointing out to tools, services, documentation and procedural guidelines to maximize the usage of the resources.

The VO services activities are summarized in four main points:

• Evaluation of VO and VRC support services and tools: To evaluate tools and services aiming to foster production quality by the VO users.
• Provision of services and tools for VOs and VRCS: To provide or help setting up services and tools for VO management and VO monitoring.
• Consultancy for VO managers: To provide consultancy services to VO managers, clarifying procedures and gathering documentation aiming to optimize the VO managers daily work.
• Helpdesk for VO managers: To provide a first line support to VO managers.

Consultancy for VO Managers

The GGUS VO Services Support Unit is the official communication channel between VO managers and VO Services staff. One of its main objectives is to provide a direct link to VO managers so that they can ask for consultancy services on VO management issues, like:

• ask for help on operations through different scenarios
• provide feedback regarding specific tools and services
• discuss and assess requests and enhancements

While interacting with the VO managers, VO Services staff can involve different experts in the discussions, and bridge VO managers requests with the appropriate support units. Through the interactions with the VO managers, different requirements can also emerge. In this case, it is the VO Services Support Unit responsibility to summarize the discussion into a requirement, and insert it in EGI Request Tracker. USCT is then responsible for the requirement follow up.

Documentation

Through this subtask, the VO Service staff is also responsible for evaluating and gathering documentation found important for VO managers daily activities. The Relevant documentation for VO activities wiki pages presents a snapshot of the current aggregated material.

All communities (VRCs, VOs, NGIs, ...) are invited to recommend topics about which new materials should be prepared (manuals, presentations, etc...) or even to share their own materials about VO management related topics.

Helpdesk for VO managers

A first line service to support VO managers is consolidated through the GGUS VO Services Support Unit. Through this service, the VO managers can:

• ask for support while operating their VO
• ask for clarification of procedures
• ask for documentation improvements

The VO Service team seats behind the GGUS VO Services Support Unit and is responsible for evaluating VO managers requests and treat them in a timely manner. Because this support unit is fully integrated in GGUS user support workflows, it is possible to reassign requests to other support units and/or involved other experts in the evaluation of a given request. For the previous reasons, the GGUS VO Services Support Unit represents the primordial point of contact for VO managers support. Nevertheless, the VO Services mailing list is also available through * Mailing list: vo-services@mailman.egi.eu

Promotion of VO activities

VO activities normally consist of a very well defined set of procedures executed on a specific defined order. To minimize time and optimize success, the VO Service team has investigated tools and services available within the EGI community that could be adapted to multi-VO environments. The final goal is to easy the access to those applications aiming to foster production quality by the users of a VO. The following sections present a list of tools and services that could be offered as Emerging VOs.

Services and Tools

Please check the Services and Tools portfolio wiki page compiled by the VO Services team.

VO Infrastructure Monitoring

Members of VRCs and VOs should be able to assess how reliable their production infrastructure is. VRCs and VO members should be able to use integrated tools that run VO specific tests on their infrastructure on a regular basis, and make the results visible for VO and VRC members. Such tools tipically consist of multiple modules:

• An infrastructure testing framework: A component that can host VO/VRC specific tests and run these tests on a regular basis on the infrastructure
• A monitor system: A system that collects test results and makes them visible for VO/VRC members
• An alarm system: A component that can raise alarms whenever a site/service/resource fails a VO-specific test.

Services and Tools

• VO Service Availability Monitoring: A guide to install a catch-all VO SAM instance to be able to monitor the VO infrastructure.
• Survey on monitoring tools: Document aiming to provide information about the characteristics of diverse tools for monitoring or/and accounting in Grid infrastructures outlining features such as: main functionality, technical requirements oroperational complexity.

Activity documentation

Workplans

• Activity Summary and 6 months Workplan (Month 6)

USAG Presentations

• USAG Fev 2011
• USAG Nov 2010

Internal schedule

• Activity reports schedule

Contacts

• GGUS: VO Services Support Unit
• Mailing list: vo-services@mailman.egi.eu