The Commons of Compute

harms: Eleven people have already made the calculation you are asking them not to make; It asks for self-restraint from people with a reason to defect; The next person to defect is rewarded by everyone else having complied

gains: It treats the users as members of a relationship rather than as users; It builds the norm that makes any rule enforceable later; It costs nothing and starts immediately

harms: Caps fall hardest on exactly the researchers doing the urgent work; A quota on a shared resource makes the scarcity visible and therefore political; Fair-share scheduling is only fair if capacity is genuinely scarce

gains: It makes the cost of use visible, which is what voluntary approaches lack; Nobody has to rely on goodwill to get a result; It scales: the rule applies to the four thousandth user as to the first

harms: Ability to pay becomes ability to do the work; A free tier is a polite name for a queue nobody in a hurry can wait in; It converts a gift into a market, with the usual buyers and sellers

gains: It is the only option that reliably rations a scarce resource quickly; The revenue can fund the capacity that removes the scarcity; It needs no enforcement and no trust

harms: Ten per cent of the cluster is idle on the nights it is most needed; It privileges small work over large work regardless of merit; The boundary between urgent and unimportant is decided by someone

gains: The people with least access are the ones guaranteed a share; It costs the heavy users less than a quota would; It recognises that the burden of a commons falls on its least powerful users