[ogsa-hpcp-wg] [jsdl-wg] Re: Minutes for OGSA HPC Profile telecon (Aug 18 2006)

[Andreas Savva]

Peter G. Lane wrote:
> Andreas Savva wrote:
>>>> Btw, I am really curious here, how is a user going to specify that they
>>>> want a job to run in their home directory, wherever that place may be?
>>>> Surely the exact location may differ from machine to machine.
>>> This spec (and more particularly the HPC Profile) isn't about defining
>>> portable jobs anyway. After all, requiring an executable pathname isn't
>>> even close to portable, and nor is there any mechanism for dealing with
>>> differences in path separator between platforms. (At least nobody is
>>> trying to suggest that MacOS 9 should be used as a HPC platform; the
>>> directory separator scheme there was *much* different...)
>>
>> Yes, but it is still a common use case to run a job with 'home' being
>> the working directory, or in a subdirectory relative of home. I think a
>> way to specify that without giving the full path name isn't too much
>> to ask.
> 
> FWIW, I asked about using variables in path names at one point, and the
> answer seemed to be that one can specify file systems with mount points
> that are variables. So then all you need to do is reference this in your
> WorkingDirectory element and the service will resolve the mount point at
> runtime.
> 

This is true for the POSIXApplication---the filesystemName attribute
allows you to do that for WorkingDirectory and Environment elements, for
example.

The HPC profile application draft removes these attributes for
simplicity. I was curious if there would be some other defined mechanism
to reference 'home' or not. I'll wait to see the minutes of the call.

-- 
Andreas Savva
Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd