GPN 2024 Annual Meeting

The Engagement and Performance Operations Center (EPOC) helps address barriers to fast and reliable end-to-end data transfers across all levels of the cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. It offers support to the R&E community through the NetSage measurement and monitoring tool kit, through intensive one-on-one work with sites using the Deep Dive approach, through offering baseline testing, and through extensive training workshops. However, the component of EPOC that most members of the R&E community take advantage of is our Roadside Assistance and Consulting.

Roadside Assistance (RA) gives end users a way to ask questions to an experienced team on almost any topic in the R&E networking and the cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. EPOC staff work with all staff and faculty to ensure a positive outcome, including engineers, researchers, operators, and managers. Questions have covered everything from basics (what’s a Science DMZ?) to complex (We need to move 2.5 PB of data to an as-of-yet unknown storage facility as quickly as possible, how do we do this?), to the most common (Can you look at my network design and tell me if it will work for these science workflows?).

This talk will provide an in-depth analysis of the over 350 Roadside Assistance Cases that EPOC has worked on during the last five years. We will walk through some of the most common questions we get, and give the audience pointers to our best practice documents to support common approaches to solve these issues. We’ll also analyze some of our most complex cases, talk in depth about how to balance technical problems with political realities, and give advice regarding how to move forward in situations where you have little or no control of the core components, but still need to make sure you’re supporting scientific outcomes.