Reservation System Thoughts
We discussed this at the weekly meeting on May 3rd ...
The issue I brought up is that it is difficult to get proper utilization numbers for reservations since reservations are per-project; projects are passive containers, but it is users who actually create and use reservations. Consider; two different users have reservations for the same node type in the same project. User one is allowed to allocate more then the number of nodes in his specific reservation. User two does nothing. From the project perspective the reservation is utilized, but from the user perspective only one user is utilizing their reservation. In fact, a user without a reservation in the project can suck up the nodes reserved by other users.
This is related to the issue of who is using their current reservation in projects with multiple reservations, again since we let people allocate more then the number of nodes they reserved in the project.
I tossed out the idea that perhaps we should do admission control on a per-user basis, and not let users have more then the number of nodes reserved. Maybe take the additional step of not allowing projects to have more then the number of nodes reserved by the project.
These are just thoughts I had while trying to generate utilization numbers that we can use to guide automated cancelation and approval of reservations.
With respect to Powder and the number of nodes at each site much smaller, admission control based on the user's reservation might make sense.