[saga-rg] Comments on the job API (revision 1.4)

[Graeme Pound]

Andre Merzky wrote:
> Hi Graeme, 
> 
> Quoting [Graeme Pound] (Mar 07 2006):
>> I am afraid that I find this a little bizarre.
>>
>> As I understand it; job_service.get_self() returns a representation of 
>> the _local_ client application which has instantiated the job_service 
>> object (is that correct?). This would allow the client application to 
>> perform operations upon itself via the 'job' interface.
> 
> Exactly! :-)
> 
> We call those applications to be 'Grid aware', but I am not
> sure if that is a good term.  However, the app 'knows' it is
> running in a Grid, and can actively perform actions, also on
> itself.   For example it can migrate itself, if there is
> need to do so (think agents).  Also, it can spawn copies of
> itself, to perform some partial analysis (it gets the job
> object for self, it gets the job description from that, and
> resubmits that description with some changed parameters:
> ergo the app gets cloned).  
> 
> I think taht the concept opens a range of very dynamic
> scenarios...
> 
Andre,

I really do not like this concept. It has been added as an aside to the 
jobmanagement package but opens a large can of worms.

The practical problems that this poses to implementations of the API are 
huge. For starters; each SAGA implementation must provide an 
implementation of the Job interface specific to the resource which that 
implementation targets, a large amount of additional code would be 
required to perform operations on the _local_ client application.

This must be beyond the scope of the jobmanagement package, which is 
otherwise well defined. Operations on the local client application can 
only be in a fraction (if any) of the SAGA use cases. This sort of thing 
departs from the concept of a *simple* API for the Grid.

Graeme