GDI
Author: Ernst Bablick

# Gridengine Database Interface - GDI

NB. This refers to an obsolete version of GDI.

# Introduction

The Grid Engine Database Interface (GDI) standardizes the mechanism for creating, retrieving, changing and deleting objects stored within a Grid Engine qmaster process. The GDI is the main interface to communicate with an instance of a qmaster for each client and server application which is part of the Grid Engine distribution.

Please note, the GDI represents an internal and evolving interface designed to connect project internal components which evolve with the project. If you intend to plugin an external component to the Grid Engine system, then the GDI is not the right choice. One of the initial objectives of the Grid Engine project is to design and develop generic and stable APIs which are suitable interfaces for the integration of such external applications.

# Internal data representation

The qmaster stores all information in objects such as queues, jobs, hosts, users, etc. These objects are represented internally via the Common Usabel List Library (CULL).
The GDI provides the means to exchange CULL-objects between different Grid Engine components running on different hosts. The GDI utilizes the Grid Engine communication system for the network-wide date exchange.

# Interface

The GDI consists of three groups of functions - initialisation, interacting with qmaster and shutting down the GDI. All functions are contained in the library libgdi.a. The function prototypes and any pertinent constants are defined in sge_gdi.h.

This page only provides an overview on the GDI. For more detailed documentation about the functions mentioned below, please see the sge_gdi(3) manual page and related manual pages as well as documentation in the source files. The functions described mentioned below can be found in source/libs/gdi/gdi_setup.c and source/libs/gdi/sge_gdi_request.c.

## Initializing the GDI

The function sge_gdi_setup() initializes the GDI as well as the Grid Engine communication system.

To modify the behavior of this function it is possible to use sge_gdi_param() before calling sge_gdi_setup().

## Creating, retrieving, changing and deleting qmaster objects

Only a single function serves this purpose: sge_gdi(). A more advanced variant exists with sge_gdi_multi() and a third function, sge_gdi_extract_answer(), is available to retrieve status and error messages in a convenient fashion.

## Shutting down GDI library

Shutting down the GDI is performed with sge_gdi_shutdown(). This function has to be called before exiting the program. It deregisters from the communication system.

# Modules

Most files contained in source/libs/gdi contain CULL object definitions. By convention, each of those files has a capital L in front of the .h file suffix.

Files with the word "parse" in their name, contain parsing code producing CULL objects.

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Copyright 2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.