Subject: Long Jobs history #1
From: "Naomi B. Schmidt" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 May 1997 17:41:50 EDT

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To: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
Subject: 6/28 Long Jobs mtg
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 1995 16:27:12 EDT
From: "Naomi B. Schmidt" <[email-masked]>

At today's meeting to discuss a facility for running Long Jobs in the
Athena environment, we came up with:

	- a list of user requirements
	- a list of our own issues
	- a list of next steps

User requirements:
- -----------------
1.  Some courses require students to run long jobs, leading them to tie up
	workstations.
2.  Ditto people doing theses (both graduate and undergraduates)
3.  Ditto UROP students
4.  Ditto some researchers
5.  The types of jobs include data analysis, simulation, and rendering
6.  Software includes C, FORTRAN, Matlab, Abacus, ProEngineer, Adina, Aspen
7.  In some cases, CPU, memory, and disk needs are large

Our issues:
- ----------
1.  Authentication of the user to the service
2.  Athentication of the service on the user's behalf
3.  Integrity checking to make sure that the workstations aren't hacked
4.  Shielding users from each other's jobs
5.  Don't want people to use this service as an extra dialup machine by
	telnetting to it
6.  It needs to be manageable in our environment, without lots of hand tending
7.  Who gets to use the service?
8.  How critical is the service?  What if it goes down?
9.  Ease of use for the end user
10. What platform?  It should be compatible with our standard Athena
	platforms so that people can debug at ordinary workstations
11. What impact does this service have, if any, on dialup service?

Next steps:
- ----------
1.  Invite Steve Ellis in to talk about Load Balancer software
2.  Look at hardware options, especially Sun
3.  What do we need to do here that we do on the dialup servers as far as
	security and integrity checking?
4.  We need to decide on policy issues
5.  How much horsepower do we need?
6.  We need to start up this service in a controlled way so as to get the
	bugs out and manage expectations

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