Production operation of large distributed computing infrastructures (DCI)
still requires a lot of human intervention to reach acceptable quality of
service. This may be achievable for scientific communities with solid IT
support, but it remains a show-stopper for others. Some application execution
environments are used to hide runtime technical issues from end users. But they
mostly aim at fault-tolerance rather than incident resolution, and their
operation still requires substantial manpower. A longer-term support activity
is thus needed to ensure sustained quality of service for Virtual Organisations
(VO). This paper describes how the biomed VO has addressed this challenge by
setting up a technical support team. Its organisation, tooling, daily tasks,
and procedures are described. Results are shown in terms of resource usage by
end users, amount of reported incidents, and developed software tools. Based on
our experience, we suggest ways to measure the impact of the technical support,
perspectives to decrease its human cost and make it more community-specific.Comment: HealthGrid'12, Amsterdam : Netherlands (2012
