[kepler-dev] VNC for 'detached execution' of Kepler?

[Matt Jones]

Hi,

Tobin Fricke wrote:
> 
> A more ambitious (but cleaner) scheme would be to define a network
> interface between vergil and ptexecute, so that you could
> connect/disconnect instances of the GUI (vergil) to running instances of
> Ptolemy (ptexecute)  on the fly.

And personally I think this is the right way to go, although the VNC 
trick would work in a limited way now, so might have some benefits over 
the short term.

In SEEK we've been talking about running various computations as part of 
a grid, and I've been thinking that we should have ptexecute on each of 
those nodes (this fits into our REAP proposal too).  Then, a vergil 
interface on a client machine could be used to design an abstract 
workflow.  That abstract model would then be analyzed by a scheduler 
that has knowledge of the nodes on which ptexecute is available to 
determine which parts of the model should be run on which nodes 
(optimizing the data transfer/computational power tradeoff).  This 
produces a concrete model that is to be executed.  The vergil client 
would somehow need to mediate message passing among the directors 
running at each ptexecute node, and we would defiitely want to handle 
direct data flow from one ptexecute node to another without passig the 
data through the vergil client (we've been referring to this as '3rd 
party' data transfer).

It could even be extended to allow code migration, by having part of the 
vergil/ptexecute interface include the ability to transfer jar files 
that contain all of the code needed to execute a given actor or model -- 
this jar could then be loaded at runtime by the ptexecute engine.  Of 
course, this would then imply the need for a strong sandbox and 
appropriate access controls, but presumably this would be needed in any 
grid environment.

Matt


-- 
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Matt Jones                                     jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439    Ph: 907-789-0496
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
University of California Santa Barbara
Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
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