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

[Marvin Theimer]

Hi;

 

I'm not advocating an array interface on individual activities.  Rather
I'm asking whether there is some way of avoiding having two interfaces
be defined that need to be kept in sync.  One possibility is to have a
single interface that takes either no activityID as a parameter or an
array of them.  The former case represents interaction with a particular
activity through its AED while the latter represents interaction with a
BES services about multiple activities (i.e. one or more).

 

I not so sure that there will be substantive differences between the
interface provided by BES and the one provided by each activity
directly.  In a high throughput compute cluster scenario -- which is a
VERY common case -- users -- and not just sys admins -- will routinely
want to query and manipulate multiple activities at the same time.  For
example, modern UIs show multiple activities and hence must query
multiple ones.  Notifications can substantially reduce this traffic, but
there are still plenty of occasions where a user's client software will
want to query multiple activities.  As another example, users will
routinely do things like cancel all the activities related to some
larger workflow, such as a parameter sweep.  So I would argue that the
canonical interface to an execution subsystem should be sets of
activities rather than individual activities.  This point-of-view would
imply that the interface on a single activity is really just a special
case of the interface for dealing with sets of activities.  Of course,
the special case of interacting/querying a single activity is also a
very common one.  But I would argue that both scenarios need to be
equally well supported.

 

 

Marvin.

 

________________________________

From: Peter Lane [mailto:lane at mcs.anl.gov] 
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 5:20 PM
To: Marvin Theimer
Cc: ogsa-bes-wg at ggf.org; Ed Lassettre
Subject: Re: [ogsa-bes-wg] RE: Questions and potential changes to BES,
as seen from HPC Profile point-of-view

 

 

On Jun 5, 2006, at 5:52 PM, Marvin Theimer wrote:





Hi;

 

A couple more questions:

*        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).



Peter

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