The Florida Grid Operations Center was created in conformance with the OSG operations model to help with the maintenance and support of grid-enabled resources on the OSG in the State of Florida.

Background Information

In the OSG grid-enabled resources, Virtual Organizations and Support Centers are registered with the OSG's Operations Group. The registration process is the first step in becoming a member of the OSG community and is the primary means for establishing an entity's identity. The registration process also transmits contact information about the resource to the OSG GOC. The contact information is used primarily to relay trouble tickets and to keep resources informed on updates and important security incidents that can and do occur. The collected information is maintained for as long as the entity exists and sometimes beyond.

Scope and Purpose

When we created the Florida Grid Operations Center we did so to support all of the OSG grid-enabled resources not already supported by another more well funded Operation Center. We targeted sites within the state of Florida to limit the scope given the level of available manpower. The sites supported included the CMS Tier3 sites at FIU, FSU and FlaTech?, the IHEPA site administered by staff at the UF Tier2 Center and the UF HPC. All of these site, except the HPC site, are in physics departments and are members of the CMS collaboration.

The scope defined for the fGOC, was limited to the the resource only. The fGOC would help with the installation of grid middleware, systems deployment, cluster management issues anything related to getting a resource up and on the OSG was considered to be supported function of the fGOC. The fGOC would also, in principle help users with problems running or accessing on one of the supported sites. Users communities originating at the site were specifically not included in the scope of support. Local users that wanted to learn how to use grid resources were supposed to get help from their application community or VO.

Status

In practice the fGOC consisted simply of an email list that included Craig Prescott (UF HPC), Bockjoo Kim (UF Tier2) and Jorge Rodriguez (Formerly at UF). We directed trouble tickets to the appropriate place and help resolve problems reported by grid users through the OSG's Ops Center. Given the close communication between fGOC participants and site admins, the small number and scale of sites themselves and the low utilization we never implemented anything more sophisticated than the aforementioned email list.

The fGOC also helped to establish the grid-enabled clusters at FIU, FSU and Flatech. We experimented in deployment of grid-enabled infrastructure with minimal support consisting of 0.5 FTE to untrained student support. The sys admins were instructed not only on the use and deployment of grid middleware but also on deployment of clusters, batch systems and cluster management software. The experience revealed that a significant amount of effort is needed to deploy and maintain a grid enabled facility and a sustained and dedicated effort of no less than 0.25 FTE is required.

As of 2006 the FSU and FIT sites have either dropped off the OSG altogether or have moved on into the Integration Test Bed (ITB). The ITB is not monitored by the OSG GOC so trouble tickets are not issued. The ITB is used by the OSG as a staging ground for new software releases and to try out new sites and or applications. Also, the FSU CMS site lost its strongest proponent when the Vasaken Hagopian Physics Professor retired. The FIT site never made it to the production OSG but the fGOC did participate in helping them get onto the ITB. The FIU site is no longer in operation due to loss of its sys admin and its recent loss of adequate HV/AC. The UF-HPC site and the IHEPA are still registered under the fGOC as far as I know. Although the USCMS support center may have subsumed these sites given their role within the CMS community.

-- JorgeRodriguez - 25 May 2008