7.1.6 Enabling Reservations for End Users
By default, the power of advance reservations is only available to scheduler administrators. While admins may create and manage reservations to provide resource access to end users, end users cannot create, modify, or destroy these reservations. Maui 3.2 extends the ability to manage reservations to end users and provides control facilities to keep this feature manageable.
7.1.6.1 Enabling User Reservation Management
The parameter RESCTLPOLICY controls who is allowed to administer reservations using the mresctl, setres, and releaseres commands. Valid settings are ADMINONLY and ANY which, as would be expected, allows only scheduler administrators or any valid user to manage reservations respectively. While scheduler administrators are allowed to manage any reservation, users are only allowed to manage their own reservations. This parameter defaults to ADMINONLY.
To allow general batch users to create and manage their own reservations, the following parameter must be specified in the maui.cfg file:
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RESCTLPOLICY ANY
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7.1.6.2 Reservation Accountability
Reservations can be optionally configured with a set of accountable credentials. These credentials indicate the user, group, account, etc which is responsible for the resources dedicated by the reservation. If resources are dedicated by a reservation but not consumed by a job, these resources can be charged against the specified accountable credentials. Administrators are allowed to create reservations and specify the accountable credentials of that reservation. While end users can also be allowed to create and otherwise modify an advance reservation, they are not allowed to specify or modify the reservation's accountable credentials. Anytime a user creates a reservation, the credentials of the requestor are associated with the reservation. Currently, this accountablility only applies to throttling policies and allocation management system chargeability. Support for fairshare and other forms of accountability will be incorporated over time.
7.1.6.3 Reservation Limits
Allowing end users the ability to create advance reservations can lead to potentially unfair and unproductive resource usage. This results from the fact that by default, there is nothing to prevent a user from reserving all resources in a given system or reserving resources during time slots in such a way so to greatly impede the scheduler's ability to schedule jobs efficiently. To address this, Maui provides the ability to impose scheduler throttling policies onto reservations. With this capability, a site may constrain the total amount of resources reserved by any particular user, group, or account at any given time. This facility tracks resources and enforces limits based on resources dedicated to both jobs and user reservations.
Reservation limits are disabled by default but may be enabled by setting the RESLIMITPOLICY parameter. This parameter specifies the level of throttling policy to be be enforced. For example, to limit user reservations by hard throttling policy limits, the following may be specified:
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RESLIMITPOLICY HARD
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While time spanning throttling policies are a significant step in the direction of end user advance reservation management, it is important to track actual site usage of the advance reservation facility. It is still likely that further usage policies will be required at each site to prevent reservation misuse and provide an optimally useful system.