Transition Period in TSD
Dear tsd-user,
This is to inform you that Francesca Iozzi, leader of the TSD service team, will be in maternity leave from Monday November 3rd 2014 until April 20th 2015. Gard Thomassen, project leader of the TSD, will be back from paternity leave December 8th and will take over the TSD service in Francesca’s absence.
In the transitional period between the start of Francesca's leave and Gard's return these functions will be handled by Nihal Perera and Erik Vestheim. For a more efficient user-support and traceability of our user requests, we invite all the users to make use of the following mailing lists during the transition period and later on:
—> tsd-contact@usit.uio.no : mailing list for information about the service, administrative request, contracting etc
—> tsd-drift@usit.uio.no : ticketing system for technical support and troubleshooting
Since it was launched in May 2014, the TSD service has kept growing steadily, in terms of number of projects, number of virtual machines, and number of active users, reaching in less than six months the remarkable number of over 50 active projects! This is because the TSD is a service meeting a clear and pressing need, and as such unique not only in Norway, but on a larger European scale.
The biggest projects in TSD are now moving from pilot to production phase and they will soon exploit the TSD service at full rate. More and more users are now starting to use the Colossus HPC facilities for production, guiding us in the development and implementation of tools and scripts to improve the service and make it suitable for NGS calculations and high level statistical analysis. The software portfolio has rapidly been expanded with key tools like SPSS, STATA and R-libraries, and the TSD team is constantly engaged in expanding the portfolio to fulfill the demand of our users. Presently there is on-going work for a fully automated workflow that will allow projects to populate databases in TSD with data coming from the encrypted nettskjema responses. This will be a key component for the big projects that are based on large scale-questionare of sensitive data.
Given the high demand, we are now in the need of adjusting the service to handle the volume of projects. These adjustments include stabilization of the support routines and the establishment of adequate service monitoring tools. Furthermore we are in the process of changing the virtualized environment from RHEV to VMWare, expecting to obtained from this change a greater stability and reliability for the service as a whole.
The activity related to these adjustments are unfortunately employing much of our available resources and this might have slowed up the user-support activities lately. We have therefore decided, for optimal utilization of the working resources during the transition period, to temporarily throttle the admission of new projects in TSD. This means that all the projects that have already applied as of today will be admitted (including those that are in the process of signing the agreements), but the application for new projects might experience longer than usual waiting time during the next 4 weeks. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we believe that this will make the transition process faster and more effective and will be beneficial for all the users.
We aim at improving the TSD service to meet your need. And we are working hard for it!
Enjoy your TSD environment: It is safe! :)
Regards,
TSD@USIT