[ogsa-hpcp-wg] Application Templates

[Steven Newhouse]

> Re the Application URI:
>    What are the correspondences between the APPLICATION and VERSION
> parts
>    and the general JSDL document?

Good point. I think we need something more defined than just an application name... hence going down the URI route. The Application name would be one place to the defined URI. The version component of the URI could then be placed in the JSDL version element. Or an ApplicationURI element placed at this level and just the Version element used.

>    The ORGANIZATION part seems odd; is it the service provider or the
>    software provider that it corresponds to? If the former, does that
>    mean we cannot compare application URIs from different providers?

This is one of the discussion points - is an application template tied to the application in general, or the system that it is deployed on. I feel it's the latter... but then you cannot 'compare' URIs on different systems without analyzing the structure..

> Re Discovery:
>    Should there be a way for users to look up the templates as opposed
> to
>    just their names?

I feel not. Templates are a property of the system. The whole point of going down this route is for users to just say run my Matlab job, or my big CFD simulation. Any user specific details (input files) should be provided by the user - other details filled in by the system.

> Re Invocation:
>    I can't see how you can match/override arguments in general; there's
>    no mechanism for determining if they "mean overlapping things" and
>    I've seen some deeply odd argument syntaxes. Instead, I think the
> only
>    thing you can do in the simple case is to append the user-supplied
>    arguments to the template-supplied ones. Quick and dirty, yes, but
>    will do 99% of the trick for 1% of the effort. :-)

Yeah. I'm probably tempted by 'append' and let the application deal with conflicts - probably badly!

>    I'm tempted to say that templates should not specify the Username at
>    all. Rationale: the template author probably won't know which user
> is
>    using the application when writing it, and specifying a wrong value
> is
>    likely to lead to much more grief than utility.

Disagree - the system manager might want all users to run as a particular user but to keep the record as to who submitted the job.

> It would be nice if templates could support named replacement parts.

Not sure what you mean by this?

> If we're publishing the actual templates (as opposed to their URIs), it
> would also be nice if we could attach extra metadata to the templates
> which would be for consumption by processing entities other than the
> BES
> container. (For example: provenance of the template, usage advice, even
> an XForms GUI for filling out JSDL to use the template...)

I don't see a driving scenario for this at the moment... but if they were published yes.

Steven