Hi all,
While system administrators are interested in making the best use out of their machines (simple reason: return of investment), job submitters are interested in having their jobs actually executed rather than optimised
I think this observation is correct. The whole idea is that the user does not care about the specific resource, but only about a defined TOS (type of service, for the non-acronym impaired), and even then, only regarding the proper (and potentially early) execution of his job.
As a user, I strongly disagree. I *am* interested to have my jobs executed as soon as possible, for sure. This means I want them to be sent by a workload management system not just to any site that matches job requirements, but to the best site - e.g., with the fastest processor, bigger memory, better bandwidth etc. I may also be interested in to send them to a cheapest site, or to a fastest site among the cheap ones. I may prefer to stay away from sites that use afs, and I may need to specify that I need inbound connectivity for a worker node. I perhaps only want to use sites in one specific country, for some licensing reasons. There are so many levels of optimization that users need, one can write a book about it. This is not a hypothetical case: I know many users that schedule jobs by hand to sites that in their experience are better, while the workload management system can not tell this from the available information or job description. This manual scheduling is orthogonal to the Grid idea, I dare say. Instead, job specification should include very explicit attributes, including potentially a preferred sysadmin name :-) As it is pretty difficult to define a boundary between generic service levels description and specific informmation for fine-tuning, I would say it's better to stay with one "language" that covers all. Cheers, Oxana