Achievements and perspectives of the biomed technical team

Operating a large production-level distributed computing infrastructures today still requires a costly human intervention to reach acceptable quality of service. This cost may be acceptable for scientific communities with solid IT support, but it often remains a show-stopper for others. The Life-Science Grid Community (LSGC) gathers five Virtual Organizations (VOs) related to the Life-Science field. Among those, the biomed VO has set up a technical support team to be the technical interface between VO users and the NGI sites providing computing, storage and infrastructure services. The support team is a front-line for handling requests from sites and users; it monitors the resources, and enforces a set of pro-active measures to improve the service quality. It liaises with EGI-Inspire instances (UCB, UCST) to report needs, share experience, and learn from other communities' experience and best-practices. This abstract presents those goals in more details, the achievements of the past year, and highlights current actions and challenges. Overall, the handling of technical issues in an international VO still requires substantial manpower, to the expense of domain-specific activities. Exciting challenges remain to bring the full potential of grids to the end users.