Telephone Conference 2010-10-19

Participants

• Alvise Dorigo
• Martin Skou Andersen
• Björn Hagemeier

Topics

This telephone conference dealt with the evaluation of the existing clients and some organizational stuff

Evaluation document

• Should add diagrams that better depict the situation than only plain text
• Distinction between compute and Data
  • UNICORE does not distinguish
  • ARC compute clients only support job submission and the like. Data transfer is dealt with in separate libraries.
  • gLite does distinguish, but simple data transfers client/server and server/server are supported by the compute clients
• Add information about brokering capabilities of the clients (TODO)
• How portable are the clients? We should have a matrix of supported platforms (TODO)
  • UNICORE, being based on Java is very portable (Windows, MacOS, Linux)
  • ARC is also very portable, can run on Windows, MacOS and all flavors of Linux
  • Most gLite components could be built manually on several platforms. ETICS seems to pose a barrier here, as it is difficult to configure for platforms other than SL 4 or SL 5.
• Add links to client documentation, so all of us can get a better understanding of the details of each other's middleware. (TODO)
• Chances for harmonization
  • common library for EMI proposed by Martin
    • Valid idea, but I think this is rather for communication with the EMI Execution Services, which will take time to be developed
    • Could be going a bit too far for accessing all of the middlewares
  • From the user's point of view: align interface, e.g. command line options, command names etc.
    • cf. qsub command available for many RMSs.

Organizational

• We will maintain a common todo list on the group's Wiki page

-- BjoernHagemeier - 19-Oct-2010