[DRMAA-WG] misssing exceptions and thread safety

[Andre Merzky]

Quoting [Daniel Gruber] (Mar 01 2010):
> 
>    Hi,
>    while scanning the wiki I found following:
>    The Job object methods should throw following exceptions:
>    - "JobAlreadySuspendedException" from suspend method when
>      job is already suspended. The DRMAA implementation have
>      to make sure that suspend job is just called once. It is not enough
>      for the DRMAA implementation to rely on own state, it should
>      check the state automatically in order to avoid problems when
>      the state is set outside of DRMAA. Should DRMAA deal with
>      such cases?

*Can* DRMAA deal with such cases?  These are two operations which
are usually not atomic (1: check for state, 2: suspend) - so how can
a DRMAA client side library ensure that the remote state does not
change between these two calls, e.g. due to a 3rd part API call?

I guess it's ok to throw when the backend replies with that error
(job already suspended) - but requiring the DRMAA implementation to
ensure atomicity is most likely futile.

my $0.02, Andre.


>    - "JobNotSuspendedException" from the resume method (like above).
>    - "JobTerminatedException" when calling a method on a job
>       when the job is already terminated.
>       This is for "suspend" "resume" "hold" "release" "terminate"
>    "waitStarted"
>    Obvious synchronization problems:
>    - accessing an already "deleted" JobTemplate: here that same as for a
>    destroyed Session should apply (InvalidJobTemplateException)
>    - accessing a job template while "deleting" (running a job or accessing
>    otherwise): here that same as for a destroyed Session should apply
>    (InvalidJobTemplateException)
>    - write access for the job templates must be synchronized by the DRMAA
>    implementation
>    - Is there a need to make the invalid state of a JobTemplate (that is
>    when a JobSession
>      has been closed) as an accessible field or should every problem
>    covered by the
>     "InvalidJobTemplateException"?
>    Regards
>    Daniel
-- 
Nothing is ever easy.