Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
resource providers and potential users negotiate the terms of usage on their
own. EGEE facilitates this negotiation in terms of the Resource Access
Group that brings together application representatives and the ROCs.
Overall, some 20% of the EGEE resources are provided by non-partner
organizations and while the majority of the EGEE resource centers are
academic institutions, several industrial resource centers participate on the
EGEE infrastructure to gain operational experience and to offer their
resources to selected research groups.
All EGEE resource centers and particularly the ROCs are actively sup-
porting their users. As it is sometimes difi cult for a user to understand
which part of the EGEE infrastructure is responsible for a particular sup-
port action, EGEE operates the Global Grid User Support (GGUS). This
support system is used throughout the project as a central entry point for
managing problem reports and tickets, for operations, as well as for user,
VO, and application support. The system is interfaced to a variety of other
ticketing systems in use in the regions/ROCs in order that tickets reported
locally can be passed to GGUS or other areas, and that operational prob-
lem tickets can be pushed down into local support infrastructures. Overall,
GGUS deals on average with over 1000 tickets per month, half of them due
to the ticket exchange with network operators as explained below.
All usage of the EGEE infrastructure is accounted and all sites collect
usage records based on the Open-Grid Forum (OGF) usage record rec-
ommendations. These records are both stored at the site and pushed
into a global database that allows the retrieval of statistics on the usage
per VO, regions, countries, and sites. Usage records are anonymized
when pushed into the global database, which allows retrieving them
via a Web interface (http://www3.egee.cesga.es/gridsite/accounting/
CESGA/egee_view.php).
Figure 3.2
shows an example of the reports gener-
ated by the accounting portal. The accounting data are also gradually
used to monitor SLAs that VOs have set up with sites.
EGEE also provides an extensive training program to enable users to
efi ciently exploit the infrastructure. A description of this training pro-
gram is out of the scope of this chapter and the interested reader is referred
to the EGEE training Website (http://www.egee.nesc.ac.uk/) for further
information.
An e-Infrastructure is highly dependent on underlying network provi-
sioning. EGEE relies on the European Research Network operated by
DANTE and the National Research and Educational Networks. The EGEE
Network Operations Center (ENOC) links EGEE to the network opera-
tions and ensures that both EGEE and the network operations are aware
of requirements, problems, and new developments. In particular, the net-
work operators push their trouble tickets into GGUS, thus integrating
them into the standard EGEE support structures.
Further information on EGEE's operation including all the operational
documentation can be found at http://egee-sa1.web.cern.ch/egee-sa1/.
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