The following quote from the DRMAA Specification 1.0 abstract nicely describes the purpose of the API:
The Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA), developed by a working group of the Global Grid Forum (GGF),
provides a generalized API to distributed resource management systems (DRMSs) in order to facilitate integration of application programs. The scope of DRMAA is limited to job submission, job monitoring and control, and the retrieval of the finished job status. DRMAA provides application developers and distributed resource management builders with a programming model that enables the development of distributed applications tightly coupled to an underlying DRMS. For deployers of such distributed applications, DRMAA preserves flexibility and choice in system design.
The API allows users who write programs using DRMAA functions and link to a DRMAA library to submit, control, and retrieve information about jobs to a Grid system. The HTCondor implementation of a portion of the API allows programs (applications) to use the library functions provided to submit, monitor and control HTCondor jobs.
See the DRMAA site (http://www.drmaa.org) to find the API specification for DRMA 1.0 for further details on the API.
The library was developed from the DRMA API Specification 1.0 of January 2004 and the DRMAA C Bindings v0.9 of September 2003. It is a static C library that expects a POSIX thread model on Unix systems and a Windows thread model on Windows systems. Unix systems that do not support POSIX threads are not guaranteed thread safety when calling the library's functions.
The object library file is called libcondordrmaa.a, and it is located within the <release>/lib directory in the HTCondor download. Its header file is called lib_condor_drmaa.h, and it is located within the <release>/include directory in the HTCondor download. Also within <release>/include is the file lib_condor_drmaa.README, which gives further details on the implementation.
Use of the library requires that a local condor_schedd daemon must be running, and the program linked to the library must have sufficient spool space. This space should be in /tmp or specified by the environment variables TEMP, TMP, or SPOOL. The program linked to the library and the local condor_schedd daemon must have read, write, and traverse rights to the spool space.
The library currently supports the following specification-defined job attributes:
The attribute DRMAA_NATIVE_SPECIFICATION can be used to direct all commands supported within submit description files. See the condor_submit manual page at section 11 for a complete list. Multiple commands can be specified if separated by newlines.
As in the normal submit file, arbitrary attributes can be added to the job's ClassAd by prefixing the attribute with +. In this case, you will need to put string values in quotation marks, the same as in a submit file.
Thus to tell HTCondor that the job will likely use 64 megabytes of memory (65536 kilobytes), to more highly rank machines with more memory, and to add the arbitrary attribute of department set to chemistry, you would set AttrDRMAA_NATIVE_SPECIFICATION to the C string:
drmaa_set_attribute(jobtemplate, DRMAA_NATIVE_SPECIFICATION,
"image_size=65536\nrank=Memory\n+department=\"chemistry\"",
err_buf, sizeof(err_buf)-1);