Food for thought.

I've been following this thread with some interest because
I had been wondering how best to handle SGI's machines
in a remote beaker lab.

There are a few fundamental problems:
1) The machines are sometimes unique -- only one exists, period.
    The result is that at certain times the machines must be available
    to particular users -- customer/trade show demos for example.
2) They often require hours of continuous time which, particularly
    during bring up and major OS releases means scheduling
    evenings and weekends --- engineers are arranging their sleep
    schedules to take advantage of certain time slots.  Random
    start times for reservations won't work.

What seems to be lacking in beaker is Hard Start Times which
implies hard-end-times.

So for example, if we put a 4 rack UV system (2048 cores, 16Tb of
memory) in beaker it is not just going to stay there; it will be pulled
back inside SGI's firewall on a regular basis.

I was hoping that reservations would address this issue.

Thoughts?
George