TGQR 2010Q2 Report.pdf - Teragridforum.org

9.4.1 Technology Audit Services Program Goals
The Technology Audit Service (TAS) will both provide quality assurance and quality control for
TG (XD) to help maximize the positive impact of the infrastructure investment on science and
engineering research. Coupled with a strong user needs and usability analysis program, TAS will
be leveraged to help ensure that users’ needs are met, with particular emphasis on improving the
effectiveness of major users, bringing novice users up to speed rapidly and attracting nontraditional
users. By identifying user needs early on and providing the tools and information that
they need, TAS will allow them to efficiently and more effectively utilize TG resources. TAS will
also provide necessary inputs to other stakeholders, namely, NSF, resource providers (RP) and
the TG user community represented by the Science Advisory Board, interested in the optimal
usage of TG (XD) resources. TAS will also strive to provide quantitative and qualitative metrics
of performance rapidly to all of these stakeholders.
9.4.2 Progress Report
In this first TAS quarterly progress report we discuss project staffing, infrastructure put into place
to facilitate communication and documentation within the group, organizational meetings and
initial technical progress.
9.4.3 Project Staffing
• University at Buffalo: We are pleased to report that four professionals were hired and all
have started work on the program. The new hires include: Mr. Ryan J. Gentner, scientific
programmer who will work on the XDMoD (Extreme Digital Metrics on Demand) portal
development, Dr. Charng-Da Lu, computational scientist who will work on application
kernel development, Mr. Amin Ghadersohi, scientific programmer who will work on the
XDMoD portal development and XDMoD Data Warehouse, and Dr. Robert L. DeLeon
who will act as the TAS Program Manager. In addition to the new hires, existing CCR
staff members, who will have major programmatic responsibilities, have begun work on
the TAS program. These include Dr. Thomas R. Furlani, who will act as the PI and
oversee the entire TAS program, Dr. Matthew D. Jones who will oversee the technical
aspects of the program as well as the application kernel development; Mr. Steven M.
Gallo, who will lead development and implementation of the XDMoD portal and
backend infrastructure; and Mr. Andrew Bruno, developer of the UB Metrics on Demand
(UBMoD) portal, who will play a central role in development of the XDMoD portal.
• Indiana University: The Indiana University subcontract will be lead by Dr. Gregor von
Lazewski and Dr. Lizhe Wang. Initial efforts include design and implementation of the
custom report builder and support for the XDMoD design.
• University of Michigan: The University of Michigan subcontract effort will be lead by
Dr. Thomas Finholt. Dr. Finholt will be responsible for determining user assessment of
XDMoD and obtaining critical user feedback to optimize XDMoD to best meet user
needs.
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