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 accessg...@xyz.ac.uk<mailto:accessg...@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.osl...@rl.ac.uk Fax: +44 (0) 1235 445597 CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (Bldg. R18) Chilton, DIDCOT, Oxon OX11 0QX, UK [The contents of this email are confidential and are for the use of the intended recipient only. If you are not the intended recipient do not take any action on it or show it to anyone else, but return this email to the sender and delete your copy of it.] -----Original Message----- From: owner-ag-t...@mcs.anl.gov [mailto:owner-ag-t...@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.
