Auto Approving Allocation Requests Requirements Gathering

[knikolla]

Motivation

Currently, NERC admins have to approve every allocation request and increase in quotas for those allocation requests.

As we grow, and our resources are no longer as limited that they require an admin to hand-count things, we can automate the process of automatically approving "some" things.

For example

• A PI that is in good standing and already has several resource allocations that we have been billing them for a while, and is requesting a new allocation that does not involve any GPU resources may not require manual approval.
• A PI wants to decrease their quota values in their resource allocation. (I am going to implement this anyway, try stopping me)

Completion Criteria

Decision Flowchart is written and has received approval on what qualifies a new allocation request or allocation change request for auto approval.
This may be based on characteristics of the request, the user, etc.

Description

• First pass
• Approval

Completion dates

Desired - 2024-03-31
Required - TBD

[joachimweyl]

@syockel ^

[knikolla]

Just brainstorming something I thought about.

One use case that this enables is the possibility of trial resource allocations. For example auto approving a PI's very first resource allocation request with an initial expiration time of 1 month.

In the billing code, we're applying a new PI credit for new PIs in their first 2 months. This often leads to new PIs having charges of $0 while they get started. We could auto approve allocations whose quota is guaranteed to keep PIs below the margin of being charged.

This allows someone to really quickly start using the NERC for the first time and we could easily move the resource allocation's expiration time once we've reached out to the PI and confirmed their continued usage and ability to be charged.

@msdisme ^^