Hi; I think jsdl rightly stays away from workflows. However, it seems like it would be important for it to be able to describe the common single-application case of things like MPI programs -- which need the ability to say things like "all cpus must be the same" but don't need the more complex heterogeneous descriptions you present here. Marvin. -----Original Message----- From: owner-ogsa-bes-wg@ggf.org [mailto:owner-ogsa-bes-wg@ggf.org] On Behalf Of Peter Lane Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2006 9:08 AM To: Donal K. Fellows Cc: Marvin Theimer; ogsa-bes-wg@ggf.org; Ed Lassettre Subject: Re: [ogsa-bes-wg] Questions and potential changes to BES, as seen from HPC Profile point-of-view On Jun 6, 2006, at 3:06 AM, Donal K. Fellows wrote:
Peter Lane wrote:
Marvin Theimer wrote:
* JSDL seems to inherently be focused on describing a single job or a single computational resource. For example, it has no notion of describing all the differing compute nodes of a (heterogeneous) compute cluster. By incorporating JSDL elements into the BES information model it seems that BES is foreclosing the ability to describe things like compute clusters. This issue also effects what can get returned from GetActivityJSDLDocuments. If I'm wrong about this, then it seems like it would be worth having an explicit explanation about how to achieve this functionality somewhere in the specification.
I think I complained about this here as well. Certainly I've complained to the JSDL people and the ESI people about this. The JDSL people answered something about keeping it simple for now. My guess is that people see it for the daunting task it is an prefer not to address it. I'm not criticizing anyone for this. It's just my take on the problem.
JSDL describes the resources that are to be allocated to the job (err, activity) and it is not designed to handle the description of the resources allocated to the container.
Right, I meant something a little different when I mentioned JSDL. JSDL doesn't allow for describing complex requirements. For example, one might need a complex set of resources to run a distributed application on a cluster. The best JSDL can do, IIRC, is to allocate N homogenous resources. There's no way you can say, for example, "give me two IA64 machines, two x86_64 machines, and two i386 machines". This is a very real requirement by users of GRAM. Peter