[Swift-devel] Re: GRAM and Swift discussion this week?

Stuart Martin smartin at mcs.anl.gov
Tue May 22 14:41:05 CDT 2007


On May 22, 2007, at May 22, 2:22 PM, Ben Clifford wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, 22 May 2007, Stuart Martin wrote:
>
>> On May 22, 2007, at May 22, 1:43 PM, Ben Clifford wrote:
>>>
>>> On Tue, 22 May 2007, Ian Foster wrote:
>>>
>>>> Are there WS-GRAM issues that are causing problems for Swift?
>>>
>>> No one uses WS-GRAM with Swift, so we aren't really uncovering issus
>>> there.
>>
>
>> Why not?  What are you using?  GRAM2?  local executions?  Other  
>> services?
>
> for the high end stuff, Swift submits jobs to Falkon. Falkon, I think,
> uses WS-GRAM to start up its own workers, but that startup part of  
> Falkon
> not Swift.
>
> For low end stuff, the two providers that I think people use much are
> local exec and GRAM2.
>
> Local exec is not in the space that GRAM is addressing, so ignore.

Agreed.  Just trying to learn what people are doing.

>
> The GRAM2 vs GRAM4 question pretty much comes down to the fact that  
> people
> in production (at least as far as I encounter them) tend to use GRAM2
> rather than GRAM4 and so Swift tends to get used that way too -  
> there's no
> real motivation to push people to use a different submission system  
> than
> what they're used to, and one thing we decided within our group is  
> that we
> would concentrate on being very application focused (after we had  
> spent
> rather a long time pontificating and debating). GRAM2 -> GRAM4 doesn't
> provide enough incentive (in the way that a GRAM2 -> Falkon change  
> does)
> for our actual apps (for example that Tibi and Nika work on).

Fair enough.  GRAM4 is deployed on most of TG and OSG now.  It would  
be good to push jobs to GRAM4 when reasonable/possible.  The apps  
folks should not care which service is used.  It should be hidden by  
Swift.  Or are the apps folks your working with also dictating what  
GRAM service is deployed/used?

>
> At some point, perhaps, GRAM2 will decay or GRAM4 will become  
> tantalising,
> at which point it would be in the interests of being app-focused to  
> shift.
> Or we might change our priorities to be less app focused.

Some are quite happy with GRAM4 in 4.0.3.  We're improving things  
right now to make GRAM4 outperform GRAM2 in most all the important  
benchmarks.  This should be in 4.0.5.  I think things at that point  
become "tantalizing".

>
> -- 
>




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