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Hi,<br>
I am just catching up with emails from last night...<br>
<br>
Ben Clifford wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:Pine.LNX.4.64.0705160829390.22628@dildano.hawaga.org.uk"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On Tue, 15 May 2007, Kate Keahey wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">As Ian says, Borja and I were planning to meet with Ioan on Thursday to
discuss interaction between Falkon and the workspace service (not
necessarily/exclusively in the EC2 context). I don't completely
understand the relationship between swift and falkon -- are there
specific applications or scenarios that you are trying to target in this
exercise?
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
By virtue of the fact that they come from pretty much the same group of
people, they're somewhat fuzzily related - but pretty much swift is
generating (over the duration of its execution, rather than in one batch)
a bunch of jobs that need executing (as well, as various things like file
transfers). As it generates them, it sends them off to be executed. The
official ways that are 'supported' by Swift are by executing them on the
local machine and by sending them off through GRAM; however, people can
plug in whatever they want to do submissions.
I know less about Falkon because it isn't Swift, but the Falkon side of
things is pretty much about running a bunch of jobs - it plugs into the
abovementioned place in Swift so that Swift gives Falkon jobs to run, and
Falkon runs them (with a goal of Falkon being, presumably, to run it much
more efficiently than if they were submitted straight through GRAM - it
seems to do pretty well).
</pre>
</blockquote>
We intentionally made Falkon's interface and semantics as similar as
possible to that of GRAM, so applications that normally used GRAM could
easily change to Falkon. <br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:Pine.LNX.4.64.0705160829390.22628@dildano.hawaga.org.uk"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
There's two things going on with swift - one is about making it
straightforward to use at the low end of things, so that people can start
using it easily - for the most part, that isn't interesting in itself; the
other is about getting it to perform well at the high end of things, which
is where the fun research is. Using Falkon and using EC2 are both on that
side of things.
</pre>
</blockquote>
Right! <br>
<br>
Falkon is certainly about getting more performance from the same
hardware. <br>
<br>
EC2 on the other hand is more about a new paradigm of how resources are
acquired. In the batch-scheduled world, the demand for resources is
usually higher than the supply. In EC2, its likely that the supply for
resources is higher than the demand. With that said, it means that
with EC2, it is likely that you could always get more resources now if
you were willing to pay for them... this could have implications on the
resource allocation and management policies that govern when it makes
sense to get more resources and when not to. Using EC2 might be about
performance, but the really interesting part that I see emerging is a
new model that deviates from the traditional batch-scheduled systems
the Grid community has grown accustomed to.<br>
<br>
Ioan<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
============================================
Ioan Raicu
Ph.D. Student
============================================
Distributed Systems Laboratory
Computer Science Department
University of Chicago
1100 E. 58th Street, Ryerson Hall
Chicago, IL 60637
============================================
Email: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:iraicu@cs.uchicago.edu">iraicu@cs.uchicago.edu</a>
Web: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/~iraicu">http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/~iraicu</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://dsl.cs.uchicago.edu/">http://dsl.cs.uchicago.edu/</a>
============================================
============================================
</pre>
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