C: Paper and Referee Metadata

Full Paper:C532gcemoore/c532submit.pdf 

       Paper Number C532: 
       Date:	     Received 1 July 2001 
       Paper Title:
		     NetBuild: Transparent Cross-Platform Access to
		     Computational Software Libraries
       Author(s):    Keith Moore, Jack Dongarra 
       Referee:	     Gregor von Laszewski
       Address:	     gregor@mcs.anl.gov

Referee Recommendations. 
       reject

D: Referee Comments (For Editor Only) ------------------------------------

	major problem: This is a largely experimental effort that has
	not been proven in the community, but only in one
	project. Nevertheless, this could be a good contribution once
	more projects use netbuild.

   	Since the authors fairly point this out themselves, I rejected it on
   	this fact.

E: Referee Comments (For Author and Editor)  ------------------------------

   Claims in the paper like "In General the more libraries on which a
   program depends,t he fewer environment it can run on" are largely
   unsubstantiated though understandable. There is no data given
   substantiating such claims. E.g. I ran in to problems where a
   program consisted on a large number of libraries 10 and it was more
   portable that a program that was only dependent on one library.
   The point I believe one needs to make is that portability
   statements must be derived from the libraries.

   In Section C. Describe more about the efforts that are underway.
   Also the section implies that Net build is not stable, which would
   be bad for this journal issue.

   Section Searching for local libraries

	   It is not clear who one deals with dependencies in
	   dynamically linked libraries. 

		       assume I compile a dependent on b with X
		       and b is compiled with Z that is incompatible with X
		       can that be done?

   The attributes introduced in section "Identifying target ..."
   imply that a weight must be imposed on this attributes, probably to
   build a weighted sum. No analysis is provided on what would be
   best, if this is a good idea, or whay and whay not certain
   attributes are chosen.

   The use of cgi and a global database may not be such a good idea,
   as it causes a lot of delay. Why not define a service-based on other
   more advanced technologies. later in the paper this is displayed as
   a good part, but it seems to me this is more a "hack" than real
   motivation.

   What short comings does the tar format have, no explanation is given.

   Section NetCompile:

	   How can I express the dependencies of the application for a
	   particular target platform. General statements are made,
	   but they are not substantiated with an example or a better
	   explanation.

   Section Distribution ...

	   How can one prevent malicious libraries, wouldn’t every
	   library need to be signed?

   Section Related Work

	   A more precise description of what you want to "borrow" is
	   in order.

   Section Status ...

	   we would like to see a discussion about the various
	   data models. Unfortunately, this is not described here.

	   Apply the technology to at least one other code example not
	   just Netsolve

F: Presentation Changes

   all over:

       During the print the following errors were obvious a , is
       followed always by the next letter and a blank e.g. Internet,a
       nd instead of "Internet, and"

   Section D. 
   
	A diagram necessary to explain architecture/usage.

   Section 3. paragraph NetBuildTool. 

	This whole paragraph needs rewriting. The explenation of shims
	could be better

   Section 3. General

	It is not clear if the information is stored in a global
	directory or not.

   Section "Authenticaticity ..."

	   Do not use a colloquial phrase such as the sentence with
	   "okay" in it this is not very precise language for an
	   academic paper.

	   

Suggestion: Nevertheless, I believe this work is still relevant, but
unfortunately not ready by itself for a journal publication. There is a
very nice paper describing the contributions of Netsolve to the Grid
community. Maybe this work can be summarized in one page and added to
that paper?