[ogsa-bes-wg] RE: Questions and potential changes to BES, as seen from HPC Profile point-of-view

[Donal K. Fellows]

Peter Lane wrote:
> Marvin Theimer wrote:
>> ·        This leads me to wonder whether a separate WSDL for activity 
>> interaction is really appropriate since it will require that the two 
>> specifications be kept continuously synchronized and one will 
>> effectively be a strict subset of the other.
>>
> I think there are enough differences between the two interfaces that a 
> separate WSDL is warranted if not required. If the activity interface is 
> a subset of the BES interface, then I think the design is flawed. 
> Operations and properties that operate on/expose data for one and only 
> one activity should only be in the activity interface. Array operations 
> and compute resource data properties should only be in the BES 
> interface. An implementation of the BES interface will potentially 
> support multiple resources corresponding to the various 
> LocalResourceManagerType values (not necessarily a one-to-one relationship).

I've been tending to think of the operations on a BES interface (apart
from CreateActivityFromJSDL) as being for managerial/admin use, and that
the API that is exposed to users should be on the activities themselves.
Given this (possibly erroneous) world-view, the API on the activities
becomes substantially more interesting. For example, it is perfectly
reasonable for activities to have an operation (or property) that allows
the discovery of how to find the stdout and stderr of the activity, and
yet that's not generally interesting from a managerial PoV, and I think
there are use-cases where that information shouldn't be exposed that way
(e.g., where it is potentially highly confidential, such as in the
medical or industrial design fields).

Oh, that's still assuming that the container is generally inspectable to
discover its resource configuration. By saying "BES ops are for admins"
I'm not intending to exclude resource discovery. I'm just thinking about
the state-changing non-submission ops. :-)

Donal.