[Swift-devel] swift-on-ec2

[Kate Keahey]

Thanks Ben, this helps a lot! So it seems to me like we are talking 
about combining dynamic provisioning with lightweight job management 
which should be pluggable into swift.

Ben Clifford wrote:
> 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.
> 

-- 

Kate Keahey,
Mathematics & CS Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Computation Institute, University of Chicago