Hi Laurence, Laurence Field wrote:

As far as I understand the Computing Element entity is use to encapsulate the relationship between the Computing Service and the Computing Resource.

the current usage of Computing Element is as an aggregator of computing services and related computing resources. A computing service is related to one or more computing resources in an indirect way via two types of relationships: 1. computing services and computing resources can be part of the same element instance (if by submitting job to a CS, this can end up in the related CR) 2. a computing service accepts jobs and maps them to computing shares; each computing share refers to a computing resource

I am not sure if it is good to use an entity to describe this relationship. Can we just define a relationship between the service and the resource directly and remove the Computing Element?

I would say that the primary relationship between a computing service and one or more computing resources is via the share. The concept of Computing Element can be seen as a way to identify with a unique ID a set of computing services and computing resources related to each other. It can also contains the properties that apply to the aggregation. I'm not yet totally sure about the real need of the Computing Element but also I'm not sure that we should remove it. We've to ponder over it. Cheers, Sergio