[Swift-devel] Coaster capabilities for release 0.9

[Mihael Hategan]

On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 16:16 -0500, Ian Foster wrote:
> Is it possible to argue for simplicity in these algorithms?
> 

Yes.

> E.g., if I want to submit against an allocation, I should be able to
> do that, and not have the algorithm second-guess me and do something
> different.

Yes. That would be one particular case.

> 
> Having more complex things is ok, too, as long as they can easily be
> turned off--or (my recommendation) require that they be turned on
> explicitly.

What you say does beg for a couple of questions:
- if all work is done in a run but the allocation has more time left,
should the workers be shut down or not?
- if more work remains to be done in a run after an explicit allocation
was used, should the system attempt to allocate more nodes? If not,
should it hang? Fail?
- if the allocation is far in the distance from now, and a run is
started now, is allocating nodes now a matter of second-guessing or a
matter of trying to finish the work faster? What, besides alleged
complexity of the algorithm, would be the downside of doing so?