[SAGA-RG] Hosted applications

[Andre Merzky]

Hi Malcolm, Thilo, Steven, 

Quoting [Malcolm Illingworth] (Aug 25 2008):
> 
> Hi,
> 
> My apologies if this is referring to an old discussion, but here goes ...
> 
> UNICORE supports the concept of an "abstract" hosted application. This means
> that an application is installed on a remote execution host, and can be
> referred to via a name, rather than a path to the executable. In JSDL this
> would look something like:
> 
> ==================================================
>  <jsdl:JobDescription>
>        <jsdl:Application>
>          <jsdl:ApplicationName>Bash shell</jsdl:ApplicationName>
>          <jsdl:ApplicationVersion>3.1.16</jsdl:ApplicationVersion>
>          <jsdl1:POSIXApplication
>  xmlns:jsdl1="http://schemas.ggf.org/jsdl/2005/11/jsdl-posix">
>            <jsdl1:Environment name="SOURCE">input.sh</jsdl1:Environment>
>          </jsdl1:POSIXApplication>
>        </jsdl:Application>
>      </jsdl:JobDescription>
> ==================================================
> 
> Any thoughts of how I could support this at the SAGA level? The SAGA job
> description defines an EXECUTABLE property, but I'm assuming this has to be
> an actual path.

Interesting problem!  I am afraid that at the moment, that
would not directly be supported by SAGA.  You could abuse
the Executable attribute in the job description, and set it
to something like 'Executable=ApplicationName:Bash shell (3.1.16)',
for your example above, but that would indded be an abuse.

The clean SAGA way would be, IMHO, to extend the job package
to accept not only a job_description, but also an
application_description with the appropriate fields (name,
version, environment, candidatehosts, ...), and additionally
to allow to create these application descriptions via some
discovery mechanism (the service discovery for example).

My 2 cent, 

  Andre.

-- 
Nothing is ever easy.