[drmaa-wg] Definition of "system"/discovery in getDrmSystem?

[Ed Baskerville]

Another question for the DRMAA gods...

There's no clear definition for what a "DRM system" is in the 1.0  
specification. I understand that it could be implementation- 
dependent, but my assumption is that the generally accepted meaning  
is "something you can submit jobs to." On SGE, for example, then, it  
seems then that a system is the same as a cell. On Xgrid, they're  
called, simply enough, grids.

The SGE implementation seems to eliminate this concept altogether,  
and just require that SGE_ROOT and SGE_CELL be set, so when I call  
getDrmaaImplementation and getDrmSystem (via Java) on SGE before  
initialization, I get:

getDrmaaImplementation: DRMAA 1.0 Java language binding 0.5 -- GE 6.0u7
getDrmSystem: GE 6.0u7

SGE seems to displace the need for multiple "DRM systems" within  
DRMAA by shifting the selection to the SGE_CELL environment variable.  
Is that an accurate understanding?

I could certainly do something similar with Xgrid--let the user  
select a default grid elsewhere--but, since Xgrid natively supports  
Zeroconf/"Bonjour" discovery of grids, it would be nice to expose  
this discovery in DRMAA.

So, the question is: does it make sense to expose Zeroconf grid  
discovery via getDrmSystem?

--Ed