UK National Grid Service - Grid Computing: Infrastructure, Service, and Applications - page 158

be able to start to use NGS resources and understand what is available,
through to more specii c training courses focused on particular subject
areas, such as using the OGSA-DAI and Oracle services for users who
have specii c data requirements.
Through NeSC's links with the EGEE project, the NGS has been able
to leverage training and related materials developed for the EGEE
project. This has proved more difi cult than hoped due to a range of
incompatibilities between EGEE and NGS. The EGEE infrastructure has
initially focused on a rather uniform software and hardware architec-
ture. This, combined with the tight EGEE timescales that are driven in
part by the real needs of the particle physics community, has led to tech-
nical choices and software products that are difi cult to deploy and
operate in a heterogeneous production service. EGEE is working to
overcome these dei ciencies as its user base expands. Equally, EGEE and
NGS experience is teaching us which of the EGEE decisions are abso-
lutely vital for large-scale production grids. From the user perspective
differences between NGS and EGEE are gradually reducing. Despite the
detailed differences, a successful series of training events has been run
at a number of locations in the UK and an increasing amount of NGS-
specii c training material is available. Beyond induction training, user
documentation is also available on the NGS Web site. Adequate and
appropriate level user documentation remains a challenge, however, in
the rapidly evolving grid world. This is an issue that confronts all grid
infrastructure projects and will continue to be a problem until the tech-
nological and complexity gaps between the underlying infrastructure
and the end users can be bridged. Grid infrastructures are still complex
to use and increased basic training materials will be required as the user
base expands.
A dedicated outreach strategy has been put in place to encourage more
users from all research areas to take advantage of NGS resources. This
involved reaching out directly to the end users at subject-specii c commu-
nities and integrating the NGS into the research community. To facilitate
this the NGS appointed a dedicated outreach ofi cer to oversee and coor-
dinate these activities and to ensure a professional representation of the
NGS at workshops, conferences, and other appropriate events.
An important factor in encouraging more users of the NGS is the
presence of user case studies—real examples of research that has been car-
ried out in their i eld using NGS resources. The NGS collects examples of
research performed using the NGS and uses them to produce outreach
and promotional material to reach out to new communities. Real examples
of how the NGS can be used are essential in attracting new users, as even
if the case studies are not directly in the same research area, the practices
illustrated can often be used across a broad range of research areas
and topics.