Glossary of Terms

Allocation

Information about the amount of resources being acquired by a drone without evaluating the effectiveness of use.

Note

The general concept of allocation and utilisation is introduced by COBalD to internally decide which resources to integrate or disintegrate.

Controller

Manages the demand of drones for a given pool. The controller continuously evaluates the allocation and utilisation of resources for available drones for a given pool and regulates the current demand to ensure that best used drones are available via the overlay batch system.

Note

Controllers are also initiated for static pools. Their functionality is different from those of opportunistic resources by initialising the drones only once.

Drone

Partitionable placeholder for jobs. In the current state of LAPIS a drone represents a single worker node provided by a specific pool.

Note

The concept of drones is introduced by TARDIS. Drones integrate themselves into an HTCondor overlay batch system and thereby provision the resources for jobs. They act nearly autonomously to e.g. manage shutdown and error handling if required.

Job

A task that requires a defined set of resources to be successfully processed. Processing of jobs is done by drones.

Job Generator

The Job Generator takes care to continuously create jobs that are appended to a central Job Queue based on job information provided by one or several job input files.

Job Queue

Wait queue that contains the jobs in order of creation time.

Opportunistic Resource

Any resources not permanently dedicated to but temporarily available for a specific task, user, or group.

Pool

A collection of indistinguishable resources. This means that a pool defines the number of worker nodes having a specific combination of available resources e.g. number of cores, memory, or disk. A resource provider can provide a number of pools.

The simulation differentiates between static and dynamic pools. While the specified number of drones is initialised once for static pools, the demand for drones is continually updated by a given controller for dynamic pools.

Scheduler

An autonomous process that assigns jobs for execution from the Job Queue to any appropriate drone. The process of job-to-drone-assignment builds on a specified matchmaking logic.

Utilisation

Information about the effectiveness of use of resources acquired by a drone.

Note

The general concept of allocation and utilisation is introduced by COBalD to internally decide about which resources to integrate or disintegrate.