Week 6
The sixth week was spent mostly trying to set up a testing environment for our code. This was much harder than it sounds because it meant we had to first set up a testing environment for the unmodified Pegasus workflow management system, which required a great deal of manually input information in multiple locations to make sure all the programs knew where everything else was. Once that was set up, we then started testing our modified version of Pegasus and found that some of our code that worked perfectly in our unit tests, did not transfer well to the Pegasus run workflow. We plan to have that figured out by next week so that we can start running performance tests.
This week we also talked to one of the people who originally wrote the Pegasus code about how to implement the next step of our project. Once we have the stage in outsourced to the data placement service we plan to look into changing how a stage in job is run in the workflow. As we have it now a stage in job consists of both sending the data transfer request to the data placement service and waiting for that data to be transfered. In the long run we plan to move that "waiting" stage into the beginning of the next job in the workflow, or the "compute" job. This will mean that the actual transfers preformed by the data placement service will run at the same time the compute job is waiting to be started in queue. The idea being that the "waiting" at the beginning of the compute job will be significantly less since there's a good possibility that the data has already been transfered, improving the speed of the workflow execution.
Since this weekend was the 4th of July another DREU student who works in the building and I went to see fireworks out on the marina. It was really neat to see fireworks over the water, even though the park where we were watching from was packed. This week we also had a researcher from Germany stop by and give a talk on some of the research he was involved in. At one point when he was sitting with us we felt the aftershocks of an earthquake about 80 miles away rock the building. He and everyone else, especially those not from earthquake country, got really excited over it.