[jsdl-wg] Port and xRSL

[Donal K. Fellows]

Michael Grønager wrote:
> I searched the archive of the list for Port and for xRSL,
> and found nothing, though I want to throw in my two cents:

Looking at this, I feel that these things will either be fine for
extensions or are already covered. Generally speaking, I'm going to try
to argue here why changes to JSDL to achieve what you want are not
needed; this is not because you're putting forward bad suggestions
though! I just want to keep the number of changes to the doc small so
that we have a chance to get a first revision of a standard done
quickly, leaving many good ideas for future work (we already have a list
of possible resources for future work.)

> 1. Port

This would be fine as an extension in the Resources section, though the
semantics would have to be that the job requires the given ports to be
open (in general, you'd want to be able to also specify where it is open
with respect to.)

(FWIW, in my jobs the requirement to have a particular port or
port-range open is a bug, but then I structure my things differently and
I'm also working in quite a different environment to you apparently.
Just because I don't need it doesn't mean that it isn't valuable. But it
does fit nicely as an extension.)

> 2. xRSL
> * runtimeEnvironment: Specifies specific software requirements on the
> cluster
>   (like Gaussian, ATLAS and others.) It could though be added as an
>   extention to JSDL.

These things are either covered by the existing ApplicationName element
(Gaussian is one of our use-cases) or by other extensions within either
the Application or the Resources element (depending on the exact nature
of the kind of requirement). I'd like to emphasize that the Application
element as it stands is (when you take advantage of it fully) a lot
richer than many current job running systems support.

> * nodeAccess: inbound|outbound essentially a light version of the Port
>   sepecified above.

Then it's either covered by what I said above :^) or you'll need to
provide a bit more explanation (e.g. a URL where I can look up what
those terms really mean).

I hope this message doesn't come across as combative; it's not meant to.
I'm just trying as hard as possible to describe things in terms of what
is already there to minimize the amount of work we need to do. :^)

Donal.