User Support
User support is a horizontal activity that is responsible for the following activities:
- inform about actual state of the Center's resources,
- solve common problems (reactive support in the ITIL classification),
- collaborate with important user groups and teams and in cooperation with the Center's research team look for more deep solutions of specific problems and requirements,
- independently follow availability of resources from end users' point of view,
- provide a feedback (from user's point of view) to the operations and management of resources.
The group has also pro-active responsibilities, to look for potential new users and whole research teams (through workshop organziation, participation at events organizd by scientific communities etc., but also through social networking and direct personal contacts). In this work the user support group focuses on identification of research areas of common interest, where the Center's research potential can be utilized. The group is also responsible for running services directly available to end users (web server, user view on available resources, infrastructure monitoring from the user point of view etc.).The work is shared between cloud and data departments.
Center's users are also research partners, participating on the research and development activities and also in the direct utilization of Center's research results. Developed concepts and tools for tight integration of Center's own resources into the grid infrastructure will be also used for the integration with user's own resources (compute and data). Thus, also Center CERIT-SC is located at one site, user support team is prepared to deal with a large distributed infrastructure (and its users) at the national and international levels.
