Global grid user support building a worldwide distributed user support infrastructure

The organisation and management of the user support in a global e-science computing infrastructure such as EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science), a series of EU projects, is one of the challenges of the Grid. Given the widely distributed nature of the organisation, and the spread of expertise for installing, configuring, managing and troubleshooting the Grid middleware services, a standard centralised model could not be deployed in EGEE. This paper presents the model used in EGEE for building a reliable infrastructure for user, virtual organisation and operations support. A short overview of EGEE is given. The model for supporting a production quality infrastructure for scientific applications will be described in detail. The advantages of the chosen model will be presented and the possible difficulties will be discussed. In this paper we will also describe a scheme of how knowledge management can be used in Grid user support and first steps towards a realisation in the framework of the EGEE user support infrastructure.