I've been following this with interest. One point on the most recent
thread worries me:
CHAMBERS@cebaf.gov writes:
> * We also agreed that we would in the near future (following the
> purchase of the large central RAID to support the farm) make
> a read only area (world-read) that would be available via NFS,
> for Linux users plus potentially for other non-supported UNIX
> platforms. This would provide the capability to distribute standard
> software (perhaps a specific Linux area) as well as to pull raw
> data tapes from the silo. We agree that putting any files back to
> the silo would have to come through a CUE system -- however, the
> Linux user could certainly ftp any output file to the correct
> location to re-store output to the silo. This whole jput/jget
> capability is under develpment -- we intend to have a first
> implementation running in March. The JOBS software and jput/jget
> will use Java -- do you know if this is running on Linux?
Java certainly does run under Linux, but let me understand you
correctly, will jput/jget be responsible for transferring lots of data
from tape/silo/etc to some local, temporary disk storage, or will it
only do some silo control? If it has to move lots of data (jput/jget
itself) then I would NOT recommend using Java unless the java command
being used to do the transfer was actually just a wrapper for a C or
assembler routine. Java is a bytecoded, interpreted language if I'm
not mistaken, and you will make the command probably about ten times
slower than it needs to be by taking this route.
We should learn from the errors made in the design of "setup" (which
takes about 100 times as long as it should, and I'm not exagerrating)
and avoid wasting resources.
My apologies if I misread your message, and the above is not the
case. But you can take this as my vote to keep from using Native Java
for ANYTHING which is resource intensive. Using a Java-wrapped C
routine to do it would be OK -- can Java do this?? This is how Python
does things like inverting matrices, decompressing files, etc.
JAT