Multi-User Project group notes

Remote job submission

We discussed how to extend BOINC's new remote job submission to match the capabilities of Legion and others. Items:

• Add the ability to include input files directly in batch submit request XML messages. In some cases the BOINC server may be outside a firewall, and scientists' data files may be on inaccessible servers inside the firewall.

• When retrieving the output of a batch, allow the user to fetch the concatenation of all the files rather than a zipped archive of them.

• Add an RPC to get batch "meta-data": e.g., for each job in the batch:
  • host into (OS and CPU type, etc.)
  • time info (elapsed, CPU)
  • volunteer info (name)
  • which app version was used

Remote app creation

We then discussed the idea of remote app and app version creation, inspired by Natalia Nikitina's system.

• We must keep track of which user added them
• Access control:
  • Only designated users can add apps
  • Only the user who created an app can add versions of it

The interface to add an app would include

• beta test flag
• choose replication level
• choose validator (trivial, bitwise)

The interface to add an app version would include

• platform
• plan class
• version number
• main program
• need wrapper?
• other files
• file attributes (copy file etc.)
• signatures

Job graphs

We discussed whether the remote job submission should support graphs as well as bags of tasks. The consensus was: no, this can be done by an agent in the portal that polls for job/batch completion, then submits new jobs/batches.