User Support News 05 March 2007
The items from which I expect feed-back are marked in
red and the items which I propose as action items in the JOC meeting are marked in
bold red
.
Tutorials
CMS week tutorial
The CMSSW tutorial on parallel with other sessions during the CMS week caused some negative feedback.
Offline, computing and physics managements to agree a time slot during CMS and Physics/Trigger weeks which does not overlap with the physics groups sessions
Scheduled tutorials
A list of scheduled tutorials can be seen in
the tutorial page, basically
each CMS or Physics/Trigger week.
A visualization tutorial by Yana Osborne is scheduled for April.
Other suggestions?
Documentation
Reminder:
- WorkBook: to get started and up to first analysis
- Reference Manual
: brief description of content and purpose of each package
- CMS Offline Guide:
- description of algorithms
- usage and "how-to" documents which are too detailed for the WorkBook
- gathers information currently spread in numerous wiki pages to a single structure.
WorkBook
Moving to CMSSW_1_2_0 in the WorkBook, see
https://hypernews.cern.ch/HyperNews/CMS/get/workbook/128.html
.
This means that all the tutorials in the WorkBook should use 1_2_0 or a more recent version.
CMS Offline Guide
Work in progress:
I'm waiting feedback from
Reference Manual
The release for which all the subsystem and packages are required to have a documentation page in the reference manual
is 1_4_0. The announcement sent to the software development HN forum:
https://hypernews.cern.ch/HyperNews/CMS/get/swDevelopment/858.html
and a reminder about the cvs links in
https://hypernews.cern.ch/HyperNews/CMS/get/swDevelopment/868/1.html
The offline conveners should remind the developers of this milestone in their meetings
The release notes summary should be added to the Reference Manual. I've contacted reco, sim and phys tools
conveners to get started with these three main areas. More items can be added.
Getting help
Problem reporting channel for data/computing issues
I have proposed to have a "computing front end" person (or a rotating task) to monitor and follow the different channels
used in reporting computing problems (HN, ggus, savannah). I have discussed this with Christoph and Peter Kreuzer
and they will figure out a list or persons who can participate to this effort. There's a clear consensus that the user
questions should be directed to
savannah
rather that the HN discussion lists to free the discussion lists for the
technical discussions and to assure that the questions get answered. This will be announced to the wide public when the
persons participating and modus operandi have been defined.
Problem reporting channel for software issues
Most of the user support comes is de facto provided in the HN discussion lists.
We also provide the
savannah
interface
(same link as for the computing questions above, interface offers different categories corresponding software and computing issues) to give a single entry point for the
user questions.
To have the savannah problem reporting work efficiently, we need to
- define the who is responsible assigning a task to a developer
- make it clear for users that finally the question very likely goes to the same developers as the ones on HN lists, i.e. it is useless first to discuss an issue on HN lists and then address the same question to savannah (unless no reply was obtained from HN)
- have a trouble shooter who would first make sure that the reported problem is reproducible before assigning it to anyone making sure that all the necessary information is available (version, config files, private libraries).
This can be discusses in a JOC meeting when I've discussed with the catA person who can potentially participate
to this.
EGEE User Support Workshop
I've assisted to the
EGEE User Support Workshop
.
EGEE provides ggus - global grid user support - and the goal of the meeting was to understand how and in which cases we
could profit from this service. My
slides are attached to this page.
Our interest would be to use this service when it offers the most direct way to the problem solution.
In most cases ggus users would not be cms end-users but rather cms computing experts. I have discussed and I will
discuss this further with Peter Kreuzer for the data production team and with the people providing feedback
to
CRAB. It was suggested in this workshop that - for example - the data production would form a "user support unit"
(in ggus terminology) - not to provide user support but to get it from ggus. If a question would come from
this "unit" it would be clear for ggus support personnel that this comes from a big client and requires immediate
feedback.
Account registration
Martti Pimiä takes care of the afs accounts and afs disk space for cms users. Werner Jank, Nick Sinanis and Gilles Raymond have done this in
his absence. Werner is now retiring and we need to have someone (CERN staff as this is about CERN computing resources)
to take care of this when Martti is absent.
--
CMSUserSupport - 05 Mar 2007