Sustainable support for WLCG through the EGI distributed infrastructure
Torsten Antoni, Stefan Bozic, Sabine Reißer · Journal of Physics Conference Series · 2011
Grid computing is now in a transition phase from development in research projects to routine usage in a sustainable infrastructure. This is mirrored in Europe by the transition from the series of EGEE projects to the European Grid Initiative (EGI). EGI aims at establishing a self-sustained grid infrastructure across Europe. The main building blocks of EGI are the national grid initiatives in the participating countries and a central coordinating institution (EGI.eu). The middleware used is provided by consortia outside of EGI. Also the user communities are organized separately from EGI. The transition to a self-sustained grid infrastructure is aided by the EGI-InSPIRE project, aiming at reducing the project-funding needed to run EGI over the course of its four year duration. Providing user support in this framework poses new technical and organisational challenges as it has to cross the boundaries of various projects and infrastructures. The EGI user support infrastructure is built around the Gobal Grid User Support system (GGUS) that was also the basis of user support in EGEE. Utmost care was taken that during the transition from EGEE to EGI support services which are already used in production were not perturbed. A year into the EGI-InSPIRE project, in this paper we would like to present the current status of the user support infrastructure provided by EGI for WLCG, new features that were needed to match the new infrastructure, issues and challenges that occurred during the transition and give an outlook on future plans and developments.