The goal of ACCESS support is to make ACCESS resources and services easy to use. To achieve this goal, ACCESS Support offers tiers of service designed to make everything from common usage to advanced usage simple.

This starts by providing users with (Tier 1) easy-to-use tools and services (e.g., tools and interfaces that can be learned quickly and are intuitive to use), but also includes providing users with a (Tier 2) self-help knowledge base with extensive documentation and ways to ask questions to help users quickly find answers to issues they might encounter. For projects with challenging requirements ACCESS support can become more engaged with the project, with (Tier 3) short-term support engagements (MATCH Services).

Tier 1: Easy-to-Use Tools and Services

Tier 1 support takes the form of easy-to-use tools that allow researchers to quickly get started using complex computing systems. By reducing the learning curve, the Tier 1 tools and services enable users to quickly start computational jobs with minimal effort. While we plan to support a variety of tools, our initial focus has been on deploying Open-On-Demand instance for launching jobs at RPs, Pegasus for creating workflows across RP resources, Science Gateways that simplified access to certain types of workloads, and XdMod to help track jobs and possibly identify issues.

Tier 2: Self-help Knowledge Base

Tier 2 support focuses on self-help resources designed to get users to answers quickly. Tier 2 resources include extensive Documentation describing ACCESS and its associated resource providers (RPs), Question and Answer (Q&A) forums where users can post questions to the ACCESS community and search for answers, Community-contributed documentation and training materials that help users learn to effectively use ACCESS, Affinity Groups where users with similar interests can exchange information and experiences, and a Ticket system where users can submit questions to ACCESS and RP staff.

Tier 3: Short-term Support Engagements (MATCH Services)

Tier 3 support, also known as MATCH Services, provides direct support to researchers by establishing short-term engagements that pair a SCIPE awardee with a researcher to address an immediate research need to help a researcher move their science forward through concrete and contained computational improvements such as expanding existing code functionality, transitioning from lab computers to HPC, or introducing new technologies.