[OGSA-BES-WG] [jsdl-wg] application profile proliferation

[Andreas Savva]

Hi,

Joseph Bester wrote:
> I've been reviewing JSDL, the BES HPC Application Profile, and JSDL  
> Parallel/SPMD profile to see how they can be used with Globus GRAM  
> execution service. One concern I have is the way these various  
> application profiles are redefining the same basic functionality  
> (executable, arguments, environment, etc), either in their own  
> namespaces or importing from the jsdl-posix namespace, sometimes with  
> different behavior/features. It's not clear to me how (if at all)  
> these are to be/can be composed.

Just as sort of an overview of the motivation behind these application
extensions:
- The HPC Profile Application extension removes elements from
POSIXApplication extension that do not apply to non-POSIX systems.
Windows was the specific motivating example. Also it narrows down some
of the definitions of other elements defined by POSIXApplication for the
specific interoperability needs expressed by the HPC Profile. I believe
it doesn't add any new features.

We did discuss whether it was better to try and modify the definitions
of POSIXApplication extension to accommodate explicitly non-POSIX
systems and it was felt at the time that for clarity having these
similar-but-different definitions in a new namespace was the preferred
solution.

- The SPMD Application extension main motivation was to add MPI
support---though it is likely to do a little bit more than that. A
subset of POSIXApplication sub-elements relevant to such submissions are
re-used as is and I think this is reasonable usage. We did discuss
alternatives (encapsulating one or more POSIXApplication elements inside
an SPMDApplication element for example) but we felt that importing the
relevant  set of elements from the jsdl-posix namespace was the simplest
way forward.


> The feature set of GRAM seems to span these profiles: some (but not  
> all) of the limits from POSIXApplication are relevant, as is the SPMD  
> functionality of specifying the various process counts and something  
> like SPMDVariation. There is also a small amount of scheduler- 
> specific and site-specific extensions that GRAM might have to deal with.
> 
> Do other groups have plans for implementing more than one of these  
> profiles, and what approaches are you considering for doing so?
> 

I can't comment on which project is planning to implement the SPMD
extension. But we did receive initial input and interest from GridSAM,
NAREGI, BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) and also contributions
from Stephen Pickles and Chris Smith.

-- 
Andreas Savva
Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd