[saga-rg] Short Strawman versions

[Thilo Kielmann]

My guess would be that the whole SAGA effort requires a careful
balance between simplicity and usefulness.

With this respect, I believe that the SAGA group is on track: starting
from the use cases, working towards getting exactly these use cases
simple. Deciding about where to draw the border of things that should
be kept out of SAGA for the sake of simplicity is the crux of the
balance.


Comparing to the MPI standard, I believe there are 2 lessons to be
learned: (at least ;-)

1. make the API modular (SAGA does that already)
   Many people write (their first) MPI codes just with MPI_Init and
   Finalize, and with MPI_Send and Receive. (and get only later to the
   more flexible things that require further understanding.)

   To this respect, the very essential subset of SAGA should be
   identified and supported by implementations that "do the right
   thing automagically" by having good default values (e.g. for security
   contexts) 

2. there should be a "SAGA cookbook"
   MPI failed on this respect and good books came out only late,
   delaying the uptake of MPI significantly.

   I would thus suggest that a SAGA cookbook gets written as soon as
   possible, maybe as part of the Wiki?


My 2 cents,


Thilo

On Thu, Aug 04, 2005 at 08:57:16AM +0200, Andre Merzky wrote:
> 
> Well, the question is what do you want to do, really.  Just
> submit a job, just copy a file, just replicate one, just
> open a stream...  In itself the use cases are simple, if you
> take them all together its getting a large API.
> 
> Session handle and security are designed to have sensible
> default values - so you don't need to touch them.  We should
> make that very clear.  E.g., if there is a X509 proxy for
> your user id lying around, the default session handle (which
> you won't even see) should have a X509 context attached
> automatically.
> 
> Now, the qeustion really is: is it still too complex, or are
> we cleverly hiding the simplicity? :-D
> 
> I assume that I am somewhat blinkered due to my daily dose
> of SAGA - I think its blindingly simple, and we just need
> good examples (e.g. map API to our use cases) to make that
> obvious.  I might be wrong though...?
> 
> Andre.
> 
> 
> 
> Quoting [Steven Newhouse] (Aug 03 2005):
> > Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2005 16:40:35 +0100
> > From: Steven Newhouse <sjn5 at doc.ic.ac.uk>
> > To: Andre Merzky <andre at merzky.net>
> > CC: Simple API for Grid Applications WG <saga-rg at ggf.org>
> > Subject: Re: [saga-rg] Short Strawman versions
> > 
> > >Is it merily confusing (== not simple) because its so much,
> > 
> > The basic entry point involves too many 'simple' interfaces. If I just 
> > want to submit a job, what do I want to deal with? The session (probably 
> > not) & security (probably yes) APIs?
> > 
> > Steven
> -- 
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-- 
Thilo Kielmann                                 http://www.cs.vu.nl/~kielmann/