M-grid Administration Pilot Period

Authors: Arto Teräs (CSC)
Status: Final, version 1.2
Date: 2005-02-07

This document describes how the system administration work in M-grid was carried out during the pilot period from November 30, 2004 until January 30, 2005. The goal of the pilot period was to move to the production phase in M-grid, gain experiences and form best practises in the M-grid collaborative system administration model.

Update 2005-02-07: The pilot project ended as planned and the system was moved to production on January 31, 2005. The responsibilities and procedures continue according to this document until announced otherwise. The LAM/MPI library continues to be unsupported until official SGE support is available.

Contacting CSC administrators

The administrators should be contacted by sending email to the mailing list mgrid-csc at postit.csc.fi.

Responsibilities

Software supported by CSC is listed in a separate document. An exception during the pilot period is that the LAM MPI library is not supported.

The CSC administrators will

• Answer support requests sent to the mgrid-csc support mailing list within one business day.
• Maintain a list of received support requests, status of the requests and action taken.
• Send announcements to the mgrid-users mailing list when necessary.
• Follow security alerts of the supported software.
• Be in contact with HP in support requests which concern the operation of all the clusters. Local system administrators should contact HP directly in support requests concerning only a single cluster, e.g. individual hardware failures.

NOTE!

• The CSC administrators are not providing a helpdesk service for M-grid users. Local site administrator should give local user support and verify that support requests sent to CSC belong to the list of supported software.
• The CSC administrators will follow the mgrid-discuss mailing list but are not required to answer questions on that list. The users and local admins are encouraged to continue using the mgrid-discuss list for collaborative problem solving, but explicit support requests should be sent to the mgrid-csc list (optionally with a copy sent to mgrid-discuss).
• The CSC admininistrators are not responsible for monitoring logs and overall security of M-grid sites, it should be done by the local site administrators.
  

This is work in progress, the responsibilities and procedures especially concerning security should be more clearly defined.

Changelog

2005-02-07 Version 1.2. Added a note that the pilot project ended on January 30th. (AJT)
2004-12-20 Version 1.1. Removed individual administrator names and phone support, other smaller modifications. (AJT)
2004-12-07 Version 1.0. Upgraded version number as no comments were received. (AJT)
2004-11-29 Version 0.9. First published version. (AJT)