Four tiers exist in the reservation and workspace system, and the boundary that matters in practice is not the one between member and manager — it is the one between what a manager may do and what only an administrator may do.
| Tier | Who holds it | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Member | A student in a course, a member of a lab | Doing the work: launching sessions, and booking windows against their own budget |
| Workspace manager | An instructor, a TA, a PI | Running the workspace on behalf of its members |
| Auditor | Read-only staff | Seeing what is happening without changing it |
| Administrator | Cluster administrators, in ITS | Everything the platform can do |
Our source calls the second tier a "group manager"; this documentation says workspace manager. → What a Workspace Is
Three powers are confirmed.
View the group calendar. A manager sees the whole workspace's bookings, not only their own.
Book on a member's behalf. The booking takes effect immediately and does not draw that member's Service Unit budget. → Service Units & Budgets
Waive a cancellation charge. Where a penalty was assessed and the circumstances warrant relief, the manager can waive it. A manager's waiver zeroes the member's share of the charge; a full pardon is an administrator action. → Having a Charge Waived
A manager may not edit Service Unit budgets. Not a member's, and not the workspace's own. Budgets are set administratively — for a course, cluster administrators calculate the per-student figure so that it evenly divides the course's weekly peak evening GPU allocation.
A manager may not edit group limits or quotas. How many GPUs of each class the workspace may hold at once is likewise a platform-side setting.
Both are changeable by request. A manager may raise a ticket to datahub@ucsd.edu asking for either, and should say what the work is and the dates it matters on. → The Six Requests · Asking for More
Where a teammate cancels another member's booking in team mode, the resulting charge stands. Not the manager's waiver, not an administrator's pardon. It is the only cancellation charge in the system with no route of appeal. → Team Mode
Instructors, TAs and PIs can see how the GPU capacity attached to their workspace is being used.
| Report | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Reservations by group | Which groups hold which bookings, and when they fall |
| Peak simultaneous use by class | The most GPUs of a class held at once — the number that shows whether a limit is actually binding |
| Reserved hours | How much time has been committed over a span, as against how much was available |
| Effective limits | What a group's limit is right now, after any date-ranged change has been applied |
"Effective" is the operative word in the last of these. Quotas are date-aware: a course's share may be raised for exactly the span of a project deadline and revert on its own afterwards, so the limit in force this week is not necessarily the one quoted at provisioning. → Quotas Move with the Calendar
Some of these reports display cluster-wide data, not only the manager's own workspace. Two things follow from that.
The figures have to be read with their scope in mind. A total that includes every group on the cluster is not a total for one course, and a peak drawn from the whole cluster is not evidence about one roster. Please establish what a report is scoped to before quoting a figure from it in a ticket or a syllabus.
Other groups' data warrants discretion. Another department's booking pattern is not a manager's to circulate, and a manager's own group is visible to others on the same terms. The reports are a planning tool, not a public record.
Requesting a limit change with evidence. Peak simultaneous use by class and reserved hours are exactly what a request needs behind it: "we peaked at our ceiling every evening of week 7, and the project is due in week 9." A survey of student deadlines a few weeks ahead is what lets us raise a quota in advance rather than discover the surge as it happens. → The Six Requests
Booking on a member's behalf. This takes effect at once and does not draw that member's Service Unit budget.
Waiving a cancellation charge where a missed window was not the member's fault.
Steering a course off the peak. Where reserved hours cluster in the evenings, the cheapest intervention available to a manager is telling students that off-peak time is discounted and generally obtainable. → Peak & Off-Peak Hours
They are not a bill. Compute on DSMLP is not chargeable, and Service Units divide capacity rather than costing money. Storage above 1 TB is a separate matter and is chargeable.
They are not a live availability view. The status page carries what the cluster is holding right now. → The Status Page
They are not controls. The three powers above are the whole set; everything else is administrative and requested by ticket.
A report explains contention; it does not resolve it. A course whose quota never fits its roster is a provisioning problem rather than a scheduling one, and we would rather hear about it during the term than after it. → Teaching with Datahub & DSMLP · Setting Up a Research Lab
Zero availability in a class is not an outage, and a cohort can be fully drawn while an individual group still has headroom on paper. → Cohorts
The shared grader account is an account, not a tier. Each course receives one
for nbgrader and formgrader, and it holds write permission on the workspace's
public/ directory. An instructor's own account does not inherit its powers.
→ The Notebook Grading Workflow
A team is a Unix group, not a role. launch.sh -G list prints the teams an
account belongs to and -G <teamid> launches with that team's data visible.
Membership of a team changes which files are readable; it does not change what a
member may do.
→ Team Directories
A Technical Point of Contact is a designation, not a permission. A TPOC is the person a course nominates to lead its customization work, and the designation determines who we work with rather than what they can do in the interface. TPOCs may book 1:1 Consultation appointments alongside instructors and TAs. → Teaching with Datahub & DSMLP
If you still have questions or need additional assistance, email us at datahub@ucsd.edu or submit a ticket to the ITS Service Desk.