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

[Michel Drescher]

Karl Czajkowski wrote:
> One thing Donal mentioned which I would like to emphasize:
> 
> The discovery ought to be "what types of job are acceptable" and not
> what resources are there.  Or rather, the latter is part of some
> administrative interface which is misleading for job-submitting users
> and middleware.

Yes! Yes! *waves the supporting flag*

> This may sound pedantic, but it will be crucial for interop. The
> discovery has to capture realistic operating policy, and not just give
> enticing catalogues of resources which can never be combined in a
> single request!

Hit base.

After reading this mail, we are probably best fitted if we provide *two* 
resource models. Which may sound impractical, wasted resources or even 
impossible, I think the idea may be worth exploring:

(Note that I take quite some assumptions for granted for the sake of 
simplicity:)

While system administrators are interested in making the best use out of 
their machines (simple reason: return of investment), job submitters are 
interested in having their jobs actually executed rather than optimised 
'til the last percent (while I acknowledge that there actually are 
submitters that do want to or even need to optimise that way, I think 
that this is a relatively small subset of Grid users at least in the 
future).

A solution to this dilemma may be to provide two "languages", one 
fitting each group best: One language that job submitters use to specify 
resources they need, which sacrifices accuracy for practicability. This 
can be very simple, even name/value pairs.

The other language, however, aims for maximum accuracy that I envision 
to be a feature rich, (strongly?) typed representation of their resources.

Obviously, these two languages need matching when a job is submitted. 
The natural candidate for that is (Donal, forgive me for inaccuracy 
here) "something" coming from the RSS WG.

Any boos, rotten eggs?

Cheers,
Michel

-- 
Michel <dot> Drescher <at> uk <dot> fujitsu <dot> com
Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe
+44 20 8606 4834