[Swift-devel] Re: Drop kickstart, adopt wrapper logs?

[Michael Wilde]

On 7/25/08 10:57 AM, Mihael Hategan wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-07-25 at 10:48 -0500, Michael Wilde wrote:
>> Im happy with wrapper for now.
>>
>> Regarding use: there is a real need. *I* used kickstart quite a bit when 
>> working on apps. It doesnt get used because its not easy and not efficient.
>>
>> A real user need exists right now: the OOPS folding app has memory and 
>> cpu usage issues that impact its feasibility. The user (Glen Hocky) 
>> needs to compare its run time on different platforms with different 
>> compilers, and also needs to tune how many copies run on multicore hosts 
>> (bgp, sicortex, Abe/QueenBee on TG, and Ranger - 4, 6, 8, and 16 
>> respectively).
>>
>> So Glen is essentially doing his own logging in the app wrapper, using 
>> /usr/bin/time.  But this is something we can and should do for the user, 
>> simply, naturally, and by default. And make it easy enough that the 
>> basic app performance characteristics are reported on every run.
> 
> Presumably we could do similar things in the wrapper by looking at /proc
> and such. Though Jens would shout "that's not portable!".

Or even put the time command in the wrapper. I think the time man page 
makes some murmurs about posix compliance.

Nested invocations of wrapper-like entities on the worker node are all 
pretty affordable, it seems.  The costly part seems to be 
moving/accessing/recording the output.

btw - a side note here - last I looked at wrapper.sh circa March I found 
it to be very beautifully written. Im all for building on it.