[AG-TECH] internal booking systems

[Osland, CD (Chris)]

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  <mailto:accessgrid at xyz.ac.uk> accessgrid at 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
 

____________________________________________________________________ 
Chris Osland                                               Office tel: +44 (0) 1235 446565 
Digital Media and Access Grid                          Medialab tel: +44 (0) 1235 446459 
BIT Department                                     Access Grid room tel: +44 (0) 1235 445666 
e-mail:   C.D.Osland at rl.ac.uk                                       Fax: +44 (0) 1235 445597 
CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (Bldg. R18) 
Chilton, DIDCOT, Oxon OX11 0QX, UK 
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-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov [mailto:owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov]On Behalf Of Natalia Costas Lago
Sent: 07 February 2005 12:12
To: ag-tech
Subject: [AG-TECH] internal booking systems


 
 
Hi everybody,
 
 
We wonder how u all manage ur own internal booking systems with ncsa ag scheduler. Is there any way to book automatically to both systems at the same time?
 
Thanx in advance.
 
Kind regards,
Natalia.

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