[Pgi-wg] EMI Execution Service Specification

[Mark Morgan]

As promised, please find included my comments from a brief read-through of the EMI Service Specification document.  I'm afraid I don't have too much time to do anything particularly cogent and so I'm just going to type in thoughts as they occur to me while I read the document.


Section 1.2:  I fear a one-off solution for delegation when, as a Grid primitive, it would be so much more useful to have a technique for delegation that crossed service functionality boundaries.

Why do both the ActivityManager and ActivityInfo port-types have GetActivityStatus/GetActivityInfo operations?  What is the difference between them?

Page 6/45:  I like the definitions of what happens regarding data staging for various types and times of failures -- this was definitely missing in the original BES and caused some pain for Genesis II.

Section 1.4:  You have a typo in the first paragraph '"server data pull" and "server data pull"' should be pull and push.

Section 1.4:  Why limit the spec. to two types of delegation tokens rather than make it extensible?

Page 8/45:  I don't know yet what your "activity description document" is, but if it's like JSDL, a vector of them gets big quick (we had a lot of trouble with this in Genesis II and is the reason why we eventually implemented the ParameterSweep extensions).

Page 8/45:  Ditto for the response vector.  My guess is that you are not returning EPRs which will help a bit (though I don't agree with the practice), but I would suggest that you consider the WS-Iterator 1.0 specification or an equivalent.

Ongoing:  I continue to see "vectors" of things given or returned -- Again, I strongly encourage you consider some type of iteration context like WS-Iterator.

Section 4.5:  Personally I find the operation name "NotifyService" misleading

Page 26/45:  A rough, high level glance at the Activity Description Document structure leads me to believe that it is JSDL with a different name (and some extensions).  Why go to all the effort to re-write JSDL when you could simply extend it?  If you are going to do that, at the very least you need to motivate the decision.  To me, it seems unnecessary.  I understand that you want to use GLUE2, but couldn't that have been done without re-doing JSDL from scratch?

-Mark