[Swift-devel] swift-on-ec2

[Ben Clifford]

On Tue, 15 May 2007, Kate Keahey wrote:

> 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?

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).

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.

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