[ogsa-wg] RE: Modeling State: Technical Questions

[Donal K. Fellows]

Mark McKeown wrote:
> Perhaps there are other reasons for using a single message
> to interact with multiple jobs?

Surely it depends on the complexity of the jobs? I can well imagine
clients wanting to interact with all atomic jobs within a workflow and
not knowing the details of what those atoms are. To make this a more
concrete assertion, saying "suspend every job related to this workflow"
is clearly of use to higher-level services, and I would not expect the
owner of a complex workflow (e.g. one that does parameter-space
exploration) to know the ids of everything they've kicked off. And since
such things might involve hundreds of thousands of atomic work parcels,
interacting with each one individually would not be a reasonable
expansion in the amount of work to be performed, even with low-level
protocol hacks.

Simplicity and scalability have to be balanced against each other, alas.

Donal.