Confused ... Re: Workflow

[Tony Linde]

I'm bundling both under the same heading, Maria. I don't think we need
standards for either right now - or, rather, I think there are too many
other things we need standards for more urgently.

Cheers,
Tony. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-interop at eso.org [mailto:owner-interop at eso.org] On 
> Behalf Of Maria A. Nieto-Santisteban
> Sent: 19 January 2005 22:34
> To: Roy Williams
> Cc: Interop IVOA
> Subject: Confused ... Re: Workflow
> 
> 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
> > 
> 
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------
> Maria A. Nieto-Santisteban (nieto at pha.jhu.edu)
> Johns Hopkins University
> 3400 N. Charles St.
> Physics & Astronomy Department
> Baltimore, MD 21218 (USA)
> 
> Tel: 	1 410 516-7679  Fax: 	1 410 516-5096
>