Introduction to Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA)

The Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA, which is pronounced like drama) is an Open Grid Forum specification to standardize job submission, monitoring, and control in Distributed Resource Management Systems (DRMS). The objective of the DRMAA Working Group was to produce an API that would be easy to learn, easy to implement, and that would enable useful application integrations with DRMS in a standard way.

The DRMAA specification is language, platform, and DRMS agnostic. A wide variety of different systems should be able to implement the DRMAA specification. To provide additional guidance for DRMAA implementeos in specific languages, the DRMAA Working Group also produced several DRMAA language binding specifications. These specifications define what a DRMAA implementation should resemble in a given language.

The DRMAA specification is currently at version 1.0. The DRMAA Java Language Binding Specification is also at version 1.0, as is the DRMAA C Language Binding Specification. N1 Grid Engine 6.1 provides implementations of both the 1.0 Java language binding and the 1.0 C language binding as well as older versions of each for backward compatibility. For more information about the DRMAA 1.0 specification and the language-specific binding specifications, see the Open Grid Forum DRMAA Working Group web site.