Donal, Thanks for your answer - I have inlined some comment below.
1. Port
This would be fine as an extension in the Resources section, though the semantics would have to be that the job requires the given ports to be open (in general, you'd want to be able to also specify where it is open with respect to.)
Agree - and it would be fine if it were just an extension. However, I saw that one of the JSDL job types are WebService and here some kind of communication to the outside world is definately needed (even though a completely open net probably isn't). That is to say that having a WS job type calls for a port specification as well (or am I misinterpreting the WS job type?).
(FWIW, in my jobs the requirement to have a particular port or port-range open is a bug, but then I structure my things differently and I'm also working in quite a different environment to you apparently. Just because I don't need it doesn't mean that it isn't valuable. But it does fit nicely as an extension.)
My area of interest is mainly interactive use of the grid and hence I would need some kind of network connedtion open to be able to steer a calculation.
These things are either covered by the existing ApplicationName element (Gaussian is one of our use-cases) or by other extensions within either the Application or the Resources element (depending on the exact nature of the kind of requirement). I'd like to emphasize that the Application element as it stands is (when you take advantage of it fully) a lot richer than many current job running systems support.
Here I rest my case ;-) I overlooked or misinterpreted the meaning of that element.
* nodeAccess: inbound|outbound essentially a light version of the Port sepecified above.
Then it's either covered by what I said above :^) or you'll need to provide a bit more explanation (e.g. a URL where I can look up what those terms really mean).
Agree - It was mainly mentioned as an example of a job des. lang that have some kind of network awareness thought into the spec. though way to minimal in my opinion. Btw. the spec is : http://www.nordugrid.org/documents/xrsl.pdf FYI: Nordugrid is with its 5000 CPUs one of the largest production grids in the world. Lately it was used to produce more than one third of the Atlas datachallange II (together with LCG and Grid3).
I hope this message doesn't come across as combative; it's not meant to. I'm just trying as hard as possible to describe things in terms of what is already there to minimize the amount of work we need to do. :^)
No offend taken ;-) I just read your fine work and just had to add to it some of my darlings. Btw: do you keep a repository of extentions and if so where? I would like to see how they are laied out so I (at least as a start) can make my "Port" extension into such. Cheers, Michael
Donal.