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

[Christopher Smith]

On 01/9/06 08:40, "Peter G. Lane" <lane at mcs.anl.gov> 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 extension, but not for the
HPCProfileApplication extension, as the HPC Basic Profile doesn't allow the
use of the FileSystem stuff (the "macro" aspect seems cool, but other
aspects are hard to implement e.g. space available for the job).

-- Chris