TGQR 2010Q4 Report.pdf - Teragridforum.org

YNT publications are intended for use by systems administration staff at TeraGrid and XD
service providers to guide deployment of technologies for use with their resources. For
technologies intended for end-user installation and use, YNT publications are intended for use by
systems administration staff supporting end-users. Documentation for usage examples will be
prepared for use by end-users directly.
The YNT team has drafted an initial definition for deployment objects, which include components
necessary to sufficiently document the deployment design, installation, configuration,
maintenance, testing and usage methods for a supported and recommended technology, along
with its deployment profiles, which document deployment instances and their current status per
service provider. Deployment profiles include defined deployment roles and associated contact
information per deployment object per service provider.
The YNT team continues to work with the evaluation teams to develop procedures and
instrumentation in the evaluation process to support documenting deployment object components
including validation tests and usage examples. Additional useful metadata from the evaluation
process, such as time, expertise and effort required to perform each evaluation will be collected
during evaluations to inform prospective implementers regarding deployment effort and expertise
required. The YNT team continues to review existing deployment models in TeraGrid and other
CI projects, for guidance in establishing appropriate YNT procedures.
To assist the overall evaluation process, the YNT team has initiated work on a metric to guide
selection and to establish priorities among technology evaluation candidates. The objective of this
metric is to establish a consistent procedure by which to vet candidate technologies for scope,
applicability, community interest and availability of required evaluation resources and expertise.
The calculated metric value for each candidate technology will rank it relative to all others under
consideration. The rank-ordered list of technologies will establish the work priorities for the
evaluation teams, and will be reviewed and updated regularly to ensure that teams are working on
the most important technology evaluations, as metric factors change over time.
9.1.5 Usage, Satisfaction, and Impact Evaluation
Led by the TIS user advocate, the Usage, Satisfaction and Impact Evaluation team is charged
with engaging the user community in the evaluation and testing process, by various methods
including focus group teleconferences aimed at finding out what functional requirements are not
being met. We have conducted additional meetings with users representing groups and interested
in topics we identified last quarter, continuing the process of learning how best to prepare,
organize and conduct such meetings, and how to feed their outcome into the TIS identification
and tracking, evaluation and testing activities described above.
As a result of the 5 meetings with groups of active users and campus champions that we have
conducted so far, we have formulated specific requirements and some candidate technologies to
be evaluated in the areas of wide area file transfers, workflow engines, and single sign-on to
Teragrid resources.
We have focused on the best ways to integrate community input into the TIS process and to
enable community input and feedback via XTED. In Figure 9.1, which was used as a basis for
discussion at the TIS meeting held at SC10, red denotes user roles that must be enabled by XTED
(green represents TIS staff roles and blue represents technology developer community roles). The
figure illustrates that XTED’s role-based access controlled tools should allow our staff to enter
the requirements obtained via our user engagement processes, as well as allowing (in a later
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