Confused ... Re: Workflow

[Maria A. Nieto-Santisteban]

hmm ...

Are we talking about how to describe workflows 

or 

how to track and submit jobs?

Because, although related, I don't thin both things are the same.

Maria

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Roy Williams wrote:

> I think there are two sorts of standard that we should be thinking about:
> 
> (1) How workflow components interact with their service container, and
> (2) How a client interacts with an asynchronous service.
> 
> In more detail
> 
> (1) I recall the situation with message-passing and parallel computers about 15 years 
> ago: each vendor had their own API to their specific messaging system, and 
> consequently the development of parallel computing was held back, because nobody want 
> to invest the time making code that might become obsolete. The development of the 
> standard MPI really made parallel computing fly because every code would run on every 
> machine. I think we are now in a similar situation with workflow systems. Each 
> workflow vendor has their own API for how the component interatcs with the framework: 
> Kepler, Chimera/Pegasus, Astrogrid/CEA, Globus4, DAGMan, Viper, Opticon/ESO, WSRF, 
> etc etc. Personally, I would find it very difficult to devote serious effort to 
> building components without knowing which will survive. Of course, the real problem 
> may be that I simply lack enough understanding of the subtleties to see that these 
> are all completely different animals -- in that case I would like my ignorance 
> banished.
> 
> (2) When I interact with the batch queue on my cluster, I use the Unix commands qsub, 
> qstat, qdel to submit, monitor, and kill jobs. I would like an analogous, standard, 
> way to use an asynchronous web service, so that a single client code can interact 
> with different services. I guess the conversation includes getting a sessionID, 
> specifying parameters and inputs, starting up the job, then either the server 
> notifies the client, or the client montors the service, and finally there is fetching 
> a result. I would guess this is all in the WS-Something specification. And I seem to 
> recall Guy Rixon posting something like this a year or so ago.
> 
> Roy
> 
> --------
> California Institute of Technology
> roy at caltech.edu
> 626 395 3670 
> 

-- 
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Maria A. Nieto-Santisteban (nieto at pha.jhu.edu)
Johns Hopkins University
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Physics & Astronomy Department
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