[99] in Open-Software-Foundation-News
Call for Participation in a Performance Instrumentation Authoring Group
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sally Long)
Tue Dec 6 15:13:11 1994
Resent-From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Resent-To: osf-news-mtg@menelaus.LOCAL
To: apc@osf.org, sig-dce@osf.org
Cc: ellen@osf.org, cmt@osf.org, flowers@osf.org, davel@osf.org
Date: Mon, 05 Dec 1994 15:14:47 -0500
From: Sally Long <sally@osf.org>
TO: APC, DCE SIG
CC: OSF Board of Directors
DATE: 12/05/94
SUBJECT:Authoring Group for Performance Instrumentation
To whom it may concern;
Lance Travis and I have been working at OSF to encourage the launching of
potential PSTs. Within the last month or two, several companies have started
to show real interest in: DCE instrumentation, performance monitoring,
load optimization, scheduling, etc.
Lance and I have found that all these areas have one thing in common - the
need for DCE metrics. For instance, scheduling jobs based on load
optimization requires metric hooks in DCE, performance monitoring
requires instrumentation hooks in DCE, etc. Given that, we feel that
one effort to address the instrumentation of DCE would be more
efficient than having each area (e.g., performance, load optimization)
provide their own development and interpretation of metrics. We
have also found that a number of DCE customers are very concerned
about these issues. Some companies feel that because DCE does not
currently address these issues they are reluctant to make a serious
commitment to using DCE.
OSF is concerned about the critical nature of these requirements and
is working on behalf of the interested parties to help form a PST, which
we will refer to as the Performance Instrumentation PST. Once
an authoring group is formed, we can change the name to whatever is
most fitting.
For those of you who are not familiar with the new PST model, the
authoring group consists of representatives from different sponsor companies
that are interested in joint development and/or joint financing to
meet a common industry need.
Two DCE RFCs have already been written that partially address these
topics:
Aggregate Computing: RFC 16.0 (Distributed Resource Selection for DCE)
HP:RFC 32.0 (Instrumentation of DCE for performance monitoring)
If you or anyone at your company is interested in working on this effort,
you should obtain the RFCs from OSF via ftp to grabbag, or contact us here
at OSF for more details.
One issue that will have to be addressed by the effort we propose is
the relationship to the DCE 1.2 work in progress with respect to
instrumentation hooks for collecting metrics. The technical contents
of DCE 1.2 are in the process of being completely specified. However,
we should be able to develop a plan that provides this technology in a
timely manner but does not adversely impact the DCE 1.2 plans.
Are you interested in participating in the Performance Instrumentation
Authoring Group, and to what extent do you feel your company will be
willing to commit resources toward these goals? If you feel that this
is a worthwhile effort, but are not in a position to commit resources,
please express your convictions to the appropriate people within your
company. Also, please remember that committing to resources could
mean: financing, engineers, offering existing technology, etc.
If you would like any additional information on the PST process or need help
in accessing the RFC's referred to in this document please let us know and
and we will be happy to respond.
If you have any ideas or are in the process of writing any specifications
toward these same technological ends and would like to have them considered by
the authoring group, but would require them to remain confidential until the
authoring group has been officially formed by those companies willing to
commit resources, we would certainly honor such requests.
Remember this will be "your" authoring group. We here at OSF will
assist you get it started, keep it going, and help you make it work.
We look forward to talking with you.
Please send your responses to: sally@osf.org (617-621-7329)
cmt@osf.org (617-621-8822)
Sincerely,
Sally Long
Lance Travis
