On Mon, 5 Sep 2005, James Werner wrote:
> I was working at Imperial with Janusz and I know his work.
> The problem about develop software for BaBar is we have to provide at least
> the same level of reliability, flexibility and functionality of SLAC. Years
> ago users tried to use Alibabar and Ganga, it does not work and users went
> back to slac.
Are you absolutely sure this is true James? -- as I remember it, the
proof of concept was demonstrated.
I would rather you rephrased the sentence above to something more along the
lines: "Years ago users tried to use Alibaba and Ganga, users could not
get it to work and went back to slac."
Also the years ago you're referring, to most middleware in the arena was
in the same state. Some users tried it and were throughly disappointed. It
might take some time to persuade those people back when we've really tamed
the HEP grids!
Furthermore, I'm not sure if /users/ did actually use the Alibaba-Ganga
combination. I'm not sure it was actually released.
For Ganga, the only change I made to Alibabar was to allow for Ganga's
separation of job preparation and job submission stages, something that
added functionality to Alibabar (useful both within and without Ganga).
It turned out that this introduced probably about 20-30 lines of code (not
much eh?); 90% of that work work was actually making sure that the Globus
and AFS and firewall and ... environments were up to scratch on the
Plug-in developers' machines (something you'd probably expect to be there,
maintained and reasonably understood these days)!
Remember that Alibabar's gsub is a throw-down substitution to qsub if you
like to view the grid as one great big batch system. If you prefer to look
at it through Globus tainted/tinted spectacles it's a throw-down
substitution to globus-job-submit. (It could just as easily be a
substitute to edg-job-submit, lcg-job-submit, glite-job-submit or whatever
it's called these days!)
What ever calls Alibabar doesn't matter; however Alibabar works doesn't
matter. Whatever calls easy-grid shouldn't matter and whatever calls the
next generation all-singing all-dancing solution to Babar Grid shouldn't
matter either. So long as the interfaces are well described and remain
reasonably stable.
Mike
--
http://www.sve.man.ac.uk/General/Staff/jonesM/
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