Scheduling solutions?

[James Conway]

Greetings Mark Topinka and Raith Users:

This is an interesting idea.  Similar to one proposed by arvind, 
hendrikb, and myself as we all seek fair solutions to this issue.

For my take I do not wish to administrate the Coral reservations and 
only wish to resolve disputes between people at the time of access.  I 
will not baby sit people or the schedule -- there is no time!

 >> This would be a self-policiing rule, but if one notices anybody 
violating it, ...
Once we agree on a straightforward policy my intention is to become very 
severe with violations after the first warning...
If it come to the point where I must intervene then the user(s) get put 
off the system with no access for one week on second occurrence, then 
one month on the third.  That I expect would keep people toeing to the 
line of the soon to be established new reservation policy.

Hopefully we can come to a consensus and a new  policy at our EBEAM Town 
Meeting February 2, 2004.
We will likely run this policy for a trial one or two month period; 
continue discussions on the raith at snf.stanford.edu list and then 
reconvene and re-evaluate.

Thank you and keep the ideas coming...

James Conway


Mark Topinka wrote:

> Hi all-
>       Thanks to John, Hendrik, James, and John for the ideas so far on 
> this issue.  It is indeed next to impossible to sanely schedule time 
> on the Raith these days.  I have a proposal which I believe is simple 
> to put into place, takes nobody any extra time, and could be started 
> immediately...   How about if the rule becomes no more than 10 hours 
> of sign-up per person for the next 7-day (rolling) period.  As soon as 
> you start one block of time, that time comes off your total and you 
> can sign up for more time.  This would be a self-policiing rule, but 
> if one notices anybody violating it, one could contact James and James 
> could remove the offending reservations (I would propose not All of 
> that persons reservations be removed, just the most distant offending 
> ones).  I took a quick look at the upcoming week, and this policy 
> would free up about 35 hours of time in the next week.  It might 
> slightly slow down super-hard-core users, but it would allow less 
> intensive users the occasional use they need.  Just a proposal...  
> There is no perfect solution (short of maybe buying five more Raiths), 
> but this might be a decent compromise for the time being...  What 
> think y'all? -Mark
>
> At 12:03 PM 1/22/2004 -0800, Hendrik Bluhm wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I like the idea of having a request based time allocation system which
>> takes into account how much time people had on the machine recently,
>> but implementing this via a human agent who sits in front of coral seems
>> inefficient, unflexible and probably also unreliable. However, it
>> should be possible to automate this by hosting a web interface on the
>> snf homepage.
>>
>> The procedure could roughly look like this:
>>
>> people request time some 10 days in advance, specifying
>> preferred/impossible time of the day/week, minimum length etc.
>>
>> 8 days ahead, those requests are assigned a priority based on
>> recent machine use (to be obtained from the coral database, reflecting
>> actual use) and granted according to the priority score.
>> People could then have 2 days to transfer the allocated slots onto 
>> coral,
>> which would require that everyone agrees not to make reservations
>> during this time.
>> Less than 5 days in advance, any free spot on coral would be available.
>> Of course, the whole system can be refined and supplemented by 
>> additional
>> rules regarding cancellation etc, e.g. canceling less than 24 hrs
>> in advance counts as actual beam time when calculating priorities.
>>
>> Implementing this would of course require some cooperation with the
>> SNF admins, but should not be to hard. I would be willing to work on the
>> scheduling algorithm, but would greatly appreciate an help regarding how
>> to set up a web interface.
>>
>> The same system could in principle be used for other equipment
>> (innotec, stsetch?, etc.), and if it turns out to be very useful, it 
>> could
>> be incorporated directly in coral one day. (Not by us, though)
>>
>> Hendrik
>>
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------
>> Hendrik Bluhm
>> Department of Physics
>> Stanford University
>>
>> Work adress:                    Moler Lab
>>                                 Lab. for Advanced Materials
>> Phone: (650) 723-4012           McCullough Bldg.
>> Fax:   (650) 725-2189           476  Lomita Mall
>>                                 Stanford, CA 94305
>
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