[OGSA-BES-WG] [jsdl-wg] HPC Profile conf call Wed Nov 29 8am Pacific time: post-SC2006 discussion

[Donal K. Fellows]

Marty Humphrey wrote:
> RangeValue_Type element clarifications
> 
> ·         If a single min value and a single max value are to be 
> specified, should it be done with Boundary_Type’s or a single Range_Type?

If you are specifying "at least X, but no upper bound" (or conversely
"at most X, but no lower bound") then that's not done with a Range_Type.
A Range_Type requires the use of explicit lower *and* upper bounds (we
do not assume that any system handles infinities right, though that
would have been a neater way to do it).

> ·         I assume Exact takes precedence over any specified 
> Boundary_Type or Range_Type’s since Exact is a MUST and the others are 
> optional.

There is no "take precedence". The overall set of values matched by the
RangeValue_Type is the set-union of the sets of values matched by the
components of the RangeValue_Type. I would interpret the presence of a
MUST only on the Exact as indicating that implementations may fault if
the other kinds of component are used. I would categorically *not* take
it as indicating any form of preference. If people want that, they'll
have to add it through extensibility (or a wrapping WS-Agreement doc, or
any number of other things). The JSDL interpretation is that anything in
the specified RangeValue_Type is acceptable; if it wasn't, it would not
have been specified.

I'd actually expect real user requests to specify lower-closed ranges
normally ("I want at least 10GB of memory, but more is cool too") and
I'd expect system-driven refinements to replace that with Exacts ("You
are going to get 12GB (because that's convenient for me to allocate,
given the number of processors you're after)").

Donal (hoping this clarifies).