Organisers

Andrew Richards, Gillian Sinclair, Katie Weeks, Claire Devereux

Objectives

To understand what has been achieved in building grids, distributed computing services across academia and industry and how is it being made usable for users and how it could be made more so.

Intended Audience

• End-users who want to understand how grid infrastructures are developing and who want to discuss how end user services are provided.
• Existing service providers of distributed computing resources and developers of grid infrastructures from institutes and national projects who want to understand how to provision infrastructure with users in mind.
• Potential users of grid computing who are interested in finding out about user experiences and the help available.

Outline

The development of grid infrastructures encompasses a wide range of activities and projects from institutional efforts to build campus grids, to utilise the under-used desktop resources, and to provide local HPC, through to large-scale distributed projects funded to provide national grid infrastructures linking to other national and international projects as appropriate.

Building the physical grid infrastructure has been the challenge of the last 5 years but it is now more important than ever to build user infrastructures that facilitate the use of and easy access to these physical infrastructures.

The aim of this workshop is to look across the different types of grid infrastructures from a single institute to national projects and to understand how end-users are supported. How are users provided with information, documentation, training, direct support. How do users interact with the physical infrastructure providers? Operating the grids is becoming similar to running a business and customer support is becoming increasingly important.

Invitation

The workshop seeks contributions from grid projects involved with, but not limited to, the following types of grid activities in particular where the contributor(s) have experience in engaging with and directly supporting end-users. The workshop also welcomes submissions from end-users or representatives of user communities who have direct experience of support requirements for operating in a grid environment.

Topic Areas:

• Grid Support Centres
• User Outreach, Training and Documentation.
• Portals, User Applications
• End user experiences of Grid Computing
• Subject specific requirements from the research community
• Experiences of non-traditional Grid users
• Grid computing vs. local resources - issues
• Problem of recruiting users to grid initiatives
• Campus Grid initiatives