Supporting User Communities

In this posting I argue that providing support on ICT topics for research infrastructure user communities is different from supporting individual researchers or research groups. This is something that computing centers, such as CSC, need to take into account to maintain their close relation with the users.

Researchers and experts at or working with a research infrastructure form a community. The research communities span typically many organizations and countries. Often they include also research from many disciplines. Such communities are organized in the sense that they have some sort of a governance structure in place, necessary for operating a research infrastructure.

That the communities are organized have certain implications for e-Infrastructure providers as well. For example, the research communities can prioritize their thematic requirements for e-infrastructure services, which is not always the case with separate labs working on same research questions. The community has also more weight towards service providers with their demands than more scattered needs of unconnected research groups. On the other hand, the computing center can rest assured that services provided for a larger user community can reach a wide user base and very often target top level research.

Many research infrastructure user communities encompass wide variety of topics, and similarly need ICT solutions for various fields. Not only more traditional computing power and computationally efficient software, but also research data management, virtual research environments as well as high-speed networks etc. It is convenient for the community if most of the services can be reached through a single service provider. Also, as the research infrastructures reach operational phase, they start to require more and more professionally provided e-infrastructure services, implying business models, service level agreements and continuous operations.

So, in many aspects serving research infrastructure communities with e-infrastructure solutions is differing from the traditional operations of computing centers, which has been based on computing capacity in one flavor for all users, provided on “best-effort” conditions. The change includes both challenges and opportunities. The trend is not totally new, of course, and most large centers have already embraced the change. However, I am sure all best practices have not been tested yet, and improvements are possible. A good bet is to increase contacts between e-infrastructure providers and research communities as this usually reveals both bottlenecks and simple improvements.

Finally, it is good to mention that all this does not mean that from now on all users of computing or research data resources should join a user community. The traditional way of supporting individual research groups continues to be important also in the future. But instead of one-size-fits-all supercomputing a variety of  ICT environments is needed, all with their roots on the common IT platforms.