[glue-wg] Dependencies among Application Environments

Tue Mar 18 10:12:42 CDT 2008

Hi Sergio, hi All,

thank you for forwarding the dependency-issue to the list and thanks to others 
for their suggestions.

We use our own abstract information model to provide information about the 
grid resources. This model is really simple and has its own weaknesses, but 
can be used to describe both our hardware and software environments (with 
dependencies between the software elements).

We use this information (now I mean the SW information) to:
a; give an overview for the end users about the abstract software components 
they can use in their grid-workflows (or job submission)
b; provide the necessary information for our grid workflow scheduler (which 
try to find HW-resources with the "real" applications installed)
c; give an overview for the administrators about the applications they 
installed/should install

The comments and solutions you suggested are all very useful, thanks a lot.
Could you tell me, please, from where your users (who prepare the job 
submission scripts) and site administrators (who maintain your application 
environments and prepare the setup scripts) get the necessary SW environment 
information? Do you have any standard information model for helping them? 
Although I think it can be a part of the grid monitoring and information 
model, you could answer me in private mail, if you think it is an off-topic 
issue.

Best regards,
Tibor

On Friday 14 March 2008 17.30, Sergio Andreozzi wrote:
> Hi Tibor,
>
> we have annotated and closed this issue here:
> http://forge.ogf.org/sf/go/artf6162
>
> It is recommended that the dependency should not be captured in the
> model; but they should be addressed in different ways, e.g.:
>
> 1. the user should be aware about these dependecies and it should
> express all the needed application environment in the job submission
> request 2. (SUGGESTED) the script/module which set up the primary
> application, should be instrumented to load also all the required
> applications
>
> is this satisfying for your use case?
>
> Cheers, Sergio
>
> Gerson Galang ha scritto:
> > This use case can easily be handled by letting the module (or the
> > necessary setup script for the application) set up the needed
> > environment for the job. I think we can safely assume that all the
> > needed applications will also be installed by the sys admin if he/she
> > wants to get software A1 working.
> >
> > One example I can think of is the BEAST application used by our
> > bioinformatics users. It's an application written in Java and requires
> > that the java module also gets loaded when the beast module is loaded.
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 7:00 PM, Sergio Andreozzi
> > <sergio.andreozzi at cnaf.infn.it <mailto:sergio.andreozzi at cnaf.infn.it>>
> > wrote:
> >
> >     Dear all,
> >
> >     I got a new use case for the Application Environment from Tibor
> > Kalman (working on InstantGrid).
> >     He would like to be able to discover if an Application Environment
> >     depends on other Application Environments in order to be used.
> >
> >     Let's say that in a ComputingService, you have three installed
> >     application environments (which LocalID are AE1, AE2 and AE3).
> >     It could happen that a user wants to use AE1 for its job, but this
> >     will
> >     imply that AE1 has to use AE2 and AE3.
> >     The scheduler should be able to discover this in order to correctly
> >     submit the job.
> >
> >     The dependency can be captured by referring to the LocalID of the
> >     application on which another application depends on.
> >
> >     The questions are:
> >
> >     1. is there anybody else who has this requirement?
> >
> >     2. how could we model this in GLUE?
> >
> >     option a. add directed association from Application Environment to
> >     Application Environment which with label "Depends On"
> >     option b. add multi-value Dependency attribute to Application
> >     Environment class (basically an implementation of the association in
> >     option a.)
> >     option c. suggests usage of auxiliary entities
> >
> >
> >     Please, send your comments on this issue.
> >
> >     Cheers, Sergio
> >
> >
> >     --
> >     Sergio Andreozzi
> >     INFN-CNAF,                    Tel: +39 051 609 2860
> >     Viale Berti Pichat, 6/2       Fax: +39 051 609 2746
> >     40126 Bologna (Italy)         Web:
> >     http://www.cnaf.infn.it/~andreozzi
> >     <http://www.cnaf.infn.it/%7Eandreozzi>
> >
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