[saga-rg] Job States

[Christopher Smith]

On 29/7/05 10:40, "Andre Merzky" <andre at merzky.net> wrote:

> 
> SAGA Jobs have currently following states:
> 
[chop]
> 
> I got the comment from colleques that PreStaging and
> PostStaging are missing.  Indeed these stages seem not to
> fir into any of the above ones.  Running would be a
> candidate, but since the remote resource is not neccessarily
> used anymore, that might be confusing.  Should these stages
> be added?  However, they do also not appear in the DRMAA
> specification AFAIK.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
These states can be added.

Also, there is a more complicated state model for "activities" emerging from
the OGSA-BES work, that also includes sub-states for file staging, etc, etc.
We can perhaps incorporate some of that as well, although I'm happy with
general Pre-execution and Post-execution states to cover all of this.

Perhaps we can discuss on the call tomorrow.


> Another question: Assume I check a job status and find it
> 'DoneFail' - how can I determine the reason of failure?  It
> would be useful to know the status the job was in before it
> failed (e.g. if it was prestating, I know then that staging
> failed, and the job never really started).  Also it would be
> nice to be able to query for any error message.
>

There is the getJobExitStatus method on the Job interface so that you can
get things like the exit code and the signal number that caused termination.

As for querying the state which preceded the failure, it sounds like a good
idea (LSF does this by keeping a history log for jobs that can be queried
via a "bhist" command). Perhaps adding an optional string to the
JobExitStatus class would be sufficient for this kind of extended
information? The problem is that this stuff is not particularly standardized
across resource managers I think.
  
> I think that the error query is distinct from the exception
> mechanism we will have: a job entering DoneFail should NOT
> throw an exception in my opinion - but that leads to above
> question: how can I query the error leading ot the DoneFail
> state?
> 
I agree.

-- Chris