[ur-wg] Mailing List Discussions: Comment #5b

[Donal K. Fellows]

Laura F McGinnis wrote:
>>     5b)     Furthermore, when talking about the logging & accounting information 
>> associated to grid jobs it is crucial to give some kind of definition 
>> of a grid job. Many of the UR properties described in the document are 
>> ambiguous because it is not clear what constitutes a grid job.  An 
>> example is StartTime. Is the brokering or stagein phase of a grid job 
>> taken into account?
>>
>> Evaluation: Defer to mailing list

This point has two distinct aspects.
  1) The StartTime and EndTime values refer to the time period to which
     the Usage Record itself applies. For a job (whether grid, batch or
     flipping hamburgers for minimum wage) one natural interpretation is
     that the start and end indicate an accounting period that matches
     when the job is "consuming resources" in some appropriate sense. But
     strictly the start and end indicate the accounting period, not the
     job.
  2) The term "grid job" is very perjorative, possibly leading people to
     conclude (erroneously) that the complexity of NorduGrid is the only
     way to run jobs on the grid (it isn't). We should make sure that the
     phrase is *not* used in the specification. Instead, we should try to
     come up with a phrasing that describes the properties of such a job;
     I don't know for sure, but it may well be some kind of composite job
     with staging and execution components, so perhaps that would be the
     best way to do it, with NorduGrid introducing a profiling on top of
     that to specialize things for their particular circumstances (the
     way many of these XML-based specifications are meant to be used
     anyway...)

There should be a way to record the usage from one of NorduGrid's jobs,
yes, but I'm not sure about the right way to do it. I don't want the
standard to end up full of things that only one system can make use of.

Donal.