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

[Marvin Theimer]

Hi;

For the case I'm focused on -- namely a BES service exposing what it has
available -- one can argue that the service already knows who the
requestor is because of standard WS-Security.  So it can choose to
tailor its answers accordingly if it wants to.

By-the-way, I'm now thinking that maybe the simplest case for describing
available resources is actually to specify a very small number of
aggregate values, such as number of compute nodes that are available,
rather than specifying an array of jsdl documents.  What do you think?

Marvin.

-----Original Message-----
From: Donal K. Fellows [mailto:donal.k.fellows at manchester.ac.uk] 
Sent: Friday, June 09, 2006 3:20 AM
To: Karl Czajkowski
Cc: Marvin Theimer; JSDL Working Group; ogsa-bes-wg at ggf.org; Ed
Lassettre; Ming Xu (WINDOWS)
Subject: Re: [jsdl-wg] Questions and potential changes to JSDL, as seen
from HPC Profile point-of-view

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.
> 
> 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!

I'm in strong agreement with Karl here (yes, it does happen from time to
time! ;-)) I'd go further and state that a resource that I cannot access
should not exist at all. Well, at least from my perspective.

A side effect of this is that resource discovery and selection *must* be
aware of the identity of the user for whom a resource is being chosen
(and that in turn means that the EPS spec will have to make non-trivial
statements about security. Yuck.)

Donal.