MURPA-Lin Wei-Week 7

1. User Interface of OpalNimrod actor
In week 7, I implemented the interface of OpalNimrod actor. The screen shot below shows that users select application name from a drop down list. From the users' point of view, it is more convenient than manually defining an URL because they don't need to know the details of any service URL. The actor obtains the service URLs and host meta-data from Opal registry.
A dummy xml file which represents the Opal registry was uploaded to NBCR Wiki. OpalNimrod actor access this xml to retrieve service URLs and number of free CPUs. The real Opal registry may be implemented in a database in the future. But for the purpose of this project and simplicity reason, a dummy xml file is sufficient.

2. Using Nimrod/K Scheduler in OpalNimrod Actor
I'm thinking about creating an instance of the NimrodResource class in OpalNimrod actor to interact with the Opal registry to select a service URL. Unfortunately, the NimrodResource class assigns an actor to resource with available slots rather than an URL. So an OpalResource class needs to be created to return a service URL to the job submission side of the OpalNimrod actor. Since the OpalResource class is only useful to OpalNimrod actor, I plan to write it as a nested class in the actor.

3. Autodock workflow

For unknown reasons, the Opal actor doesn't work with Sequence to Tag actor to concurrently execute Autodock application in Kepler 1.0. However, the Autodock workflow works well in Kepler 2.0 without Sequence to Tag actor. An Autodock workflow tutorial was uploaded to NBCR WiKi Kepler page.