[ptp-dev] on moab integration

[Feiyi Wang <fwang2@xxxxxxxx>]

hi, folks -

Moab document says it can interface with both java and c, but looking 
into the API, I have two concerns:

- It doesn't have callback function to update node and job status, 
meaning if I want to update eclipse front, I have to probe periodically.
Is orte actively updating the front? how does it handle this?

- It is strange that I couldn't find API/structure to query system 
resource. Most API documented there are job related. One Moab developer 
suggested me to use their so-called "XML api", some C function will take 
a XML string, and return XML result, the same as you would get from 
their command line tool.

The issue with getting XML string *not* C structure is, I need to 
re-parse the result and set up the correct structure again. As a side 
note, these returned xml string can be very very large:

For example, on ORNL jaguar system with over 11000 nodes, to implement 
get_node_attributes(), a query to system yields 6.8M XML string, the 
worst of it is, *a single string* - so far it render Eclipse, Emacs, 
Gedit not responsive anymore when trying to load it. Even if I parse it 
right eventually, it feels so ugly, do you folks see this is a long term 
solution?

Maybe I am not the right track, or missed something here. Any comments 
or suggestions, please let us know.

Thanks

Feiyi