[ogsa-hpcp-wg] HPCBP Extensions Short-list

[Donal K. Fellows]

Christopher Smith wrote:
> I think that doing catalogs would be very difficult, since there is such a
> large set of these things, and (as you say) each restricted domain has it's
> own notion of the catalog. I guess in my mind it comes in two parts: first
> is the mechanism to advertise locally available applications (queried with
> GetFactoryAttributes) such that I know what "strings" to put in the
> ApplicationName element of JSDL; second is to try to catalog a number of
> "standard" application names. I think the first is straightforward and
> easily doable and will provide lots of mileage in restricted domains, and
> that the second is a longer term activity that will always be updated.

I think there's some things that are entirely possible to pursue, and
others that are incredibly difficult.

In terms of modelling, if you can stand looking at MOF files at all, do
look at what CIM has to say on the topic. Although the DMTF don't do the
catalog, they have identified what set of attributes actually identify a
piece of software. Forcing some kind of correspondence there between
CIM, GLUE, JSDL, ACS and BES would be a Very Good Thing.

In terms of a catalog, things are just plain nasty. I've definitely seen
several applications with the same name (not everyone goes to the effort
of using trademark law to prevent clashes) and this can cause a lot of
confusion. It already does. The best thing I can think of right now to
work around this is for us to encourage the use of some kind of
hierarchical naming model for applications; much commercial software
already fits this to quite an extent due to the use of the vendor's name
("Microsoft Windows Vista", "Platform LSF") so formalizing it is
unlikely to be a very hard sell. By contrast, a comprehensive catalog of
everything is just plain impossible in practice.

Oh, and whatever anyone else says, "a.out" is *not* a legal application
name! (It's an executable name, which is something else.)

> This seems worthwhile to pursue. Bill and I were also envisioning getting UR
> updates throughout the lifetime of the job, so that you could see the
> running status. This is a quite common requirement from our customers.

I'll be interested to see how you get along with this; I need to start
working on doing the experiences document for UR1.0 soon. :-)

Donal.