[Pipet Devel] and still more infrastructure things

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Carlos Maltzahn wrote:

> I used "Tool Managers" because I know very little about the nature of the
> tools you are planning to use. In a 1:1 scenario, the tools allow you to
> import a Python module (e.g., the tools are Python programs or run an
> embedded Python interpreter). In this case the Tool Manager is a Python
> module that uses the Paos Client module.

Okay.  That's what I was thinking.

> But if the tools are supposed to
> be more independent, the Tool Manager could be something like a remote
> Unix shell which communicates with Paos and that can control a variety of
> tools and has access to system information such as memory or CPU usage or
> process status information.

Okey dokey.  I guess in either case, though, the "tool" would lock up during
communication...if communication were 2-way and it waited for a reply.

> It might make sense to support both solutions.

I think so.  We'll have more flexibility that way.

> Not necessarily. At some point the user wants to see the results, of
> course -- but this could either happen "on-line" (i.e. while the
> processing is going on), or "off-line" (i.e. after the results are
> archived). For long-running processing it might be useful to see the
> result as it emerges (e.g. histograms, scatter plots, etc). This might be
> interesting not only at the end of a processing pipe but also at
> intermediate steps. In any rate, I think XML is the way to go in all cases
> where you want to communicate domain-specific data.

..."domain-specific data" meaning the scientific data.

>     What really worried me was the thought of a _single_ Paos process
>     managing _everything_, including every read and write for every
>     single XML, just to get workflow information.  Agreed it would be
>     best to leave active workflow information to RAM.
> 
> What is RAM?

:-) Random Access Memory, as in 64 MB RAM, system memory, not on disk.

How's your thesis coming along?


Jeff
-- 
J.W. Bizzaro                  Phone: 617-552-3905
Boston College                mailto:bizzaro at bc.edu
Department of Chemistry       http://www.uml.edu/Dept/Chem/Bizzaro/
--