With the services at the sites for the most part in stable operations, we want to move our attention to more advanced services and users support, including user application porting. With so many experts involved at the sites, we have a great team for providing advanced user support, however coordination of effort is tricky. The people in the SAGridOps team work most of the time on pressing issues at their site, which are usually not even directly related to the grid, which means we're distracted most of the time.
During the last EPIKH exchange to Catania, we had our first batch of applications to port, which came out of the second EPIKH school at the University of Johannesburg. For most of those involved, it was their first experience of porting applications, but it turned out that this was for the most part far easier than we anticipated. During the application porting process, we documented the standard procedure for new application identification, porting, deployment and tagging. However this still leaves the users out of the loop to a certain extent, since it's all done behind the somewhat closed doors of the operations team. For those users that would be interested, we're going to be setting up a form-based webpage where you can request that your particular application is given prioroty. Users will also be able to see what we're working on - probably by checking the status of the relevant tickets on the tracking system.
All of this is just a bit of methodology to put some sanity into our work, and make life a bit more predictable for the users - which is a fundamental part of earning their trust.
Still, to really get cracking on new applications, we needed a "quiet time", a time to really get together as a team. For this reason, we are starting with a regular working meeting over EVO, which we call Technical Tuesday. We'll be having them every Tuesday, with voluntary participation by those interested. For some sessions, we'll sit with users during the final porting phases, and get feedback from them in developing the standard demos which we make for each application. For other sessions, we'll be discussing feedback internally, or working on the development of new services in our strategies for smart infrastructure management and virtual research environments.
All of this will come to a head at the upcoming EPIKH school to be hosted at the University of Stellenbosch in May ... but more about that in future editions of the blog !
for now, happy crunching :) Bruce (for SAGrid Ops)Share
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