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

[Donal K. Fellows]

Christopher Smith wrote:
> I actually believe that in the case of '2' that the implementation should
> raise a fault and not create the directory. First off, I don't believe that
> any of the existing low-level batch systems will do this creation for you,
> and supporting these batch systems is a primary goal of the HPC Profile.
> Second, I'm not a big supporter of "implied" behaviour. That is, there is a
> side-effect that a directory is created when this job is run. I'd prefer
> that a user needs to make sure the directory exists if they are specifying a
> working directory (using working directory seems to imply that the user
> knows a fair bit about the execution environment).
> 
> As for 3, I agree. It's up to the implementation to document it's behaviour.

According to my perspective, everything's OK as long as what happens is
all clearly documented. :-) Maybe could even state that this is part of
the profiled set of information a BES publishes about itself? In any
case, the real interop case is #1 (specified existing dir).

I raised the issue in #2 (specified non-existing dir) because requiring
a fault precludes creation, which is behaviour useful for higher-level
job managers, as it means that they don't need to take special action to
create a shared directory for a group of related activities. Otherwise
you end up having to do more workflow-dependency stuff in order to make
the directory that the real tasks use.

The standards perspective is: each case is distinct and should either
have mandated behaviour, or a requirement on implementations to state
what they do so that clients can discover prior to activity submission.
With that, we can state that any client relying on a particular way of
resolving this sort of issue (without first checking for it) is not
itself strictly compliant with the profile. :-)

Donal.