Dear All,
I mailed Heinz with the concerns expressed here and on the dteam list
about him running RSA-768 challenge jobs under the biomed VO and this
being seen as abuse. I also asked about the size of the jobs being a
problem.
Dealing with the second point first...
Heinz' reply was that he did put the size of the job in the JDL so it
was only running at sites that were advertising that they could cope
with such jobs - as ours must have been (Mona and Kostas, please can you
look at this for our site as clearly we cannot cope with more than 2 per
4 core machine).
On the first point...
(Heinz, please correct me if I am wrong.)
Heinz said that he was indeed running as part of this challenge and was
doing so with the full encouragement of Bob and Erwinwho were very keen
to see the results. He was doing this as biomed because of a lack of any
other VO that was any more appropriate.
Explained in these terms I can see all sides of this discussion as
having some validity. I can see why "the management" are keen perform
very well in such challenges. Heinz is only a member of the biomed VO
and besides, currently, there isn't an appropriate VO for this work.
Equally, I can see that a site like Glasgow (chosen only because Graeme
has the hard numbers) viewing it as abuse that 50,000 CPU hours that
they thought were going on biomedical research being used on this
challenge, especially when they have very many queuing Atlas jobs. While
they might be very happy to be part of this challenge (or may not be I
haven't asked) they would probably haven given it a lower priority than
biomedical research. Clearly, the answer is to set up up a challenge VO
that people can support in its own right for such things (and can give
it whatever priority they want). Is this something that we should do in
the UK or should be somewhere else (or doesn't it matter where ;-)
There was the further problem that raising tickets against biomed didn't
get any response for sometime and then I don't get the impression that
they had actually made it as far as Heinz. Showing a communication issue.
This incident has caused quite a problem, resulting in Heinz/biomed
being banned from large (and increasing) fraction of UK sites for abuse.
I would suggest both that this ban be lifted and that a challenge VO is
set up for this sort of thing sooner rather than later.
All the best,
david
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