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Natalia,
[We
don't tend to use the NCSA scheduler. We used to use
the
Argonne one and now usually use the UK one at Manchester.
At
our
site we have MS Outlook as the corporate diary system.]
Whichever scheduler you use, to the best of my
knowledge
there is no elegant way of handling bookings - the
various
schedulers don't even talk to each other! The UK
eScience
centres, which formed the core of the original crop of AG
sites
in
the UK, had an informal attempt to get each site to set up
an
email address of the form accessgrid@xyz.ac.uk, which would
get
booking requests to the AG ops at each site. Most
sites
set
those up. Where AGoping was spread over several
people,
the
idea was that that function email address caused the message
to
go to all of them.
The
duty AG op would then take the details from the e-mail and
book the required resources (node, operator, etc..) using
their
local system and confirm the booking back to the
originator
when everything was booked.
With the growing number of nodes per site, the situation
is
becoming similar to our situation with video
conferencing:
nine rooms each with dedicated VC equipment means that it is
the operator who needs to allocate a room according to the
requirements (e.g. number of local attendees,
geographical
centre of mass of local attendees) rather than any
automatic
system. The same is likely to happen with AG bookings,
IMHO.
The
fact that many AG nodes are also used for non-AG
purposes reinforces the need for human
discretion.
It
would be great if there could be a move towards a more
unified approach, and I believe there has been some
work
funded by UKERNA (the UK academic network
organization)
towards this end, but I haven't seen the results from
it.
That was aimed at VC events and how to integrate
booking
of
MCUs and suchlike, but most of the problems are either
the
same or isomorphic to UKERNA's requirements.
Cheers
Chris
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