We occasionally have the need to insert another wrapper between Kickstart and the application. For example, Robert wants to be able to wrap workflow tasks with the TAU monitoring tool. Also, we may want to add mpiexec/mpirun/aprun/orterun for MPI jobs.

We should add better support for these wrappers in Kickstart. Kickstart should support an environment variable, KICKSTART_WRAPPER that contains a set of command-line arguments to insert between Kickstart and the application. For example:

KICKSTART_WRAPPER="/usr/bin/time -l"
./pegasus-kickstart /bin/date

Should be equivalent to:

./pegasus-kickstart /usr/bin/time -l /bin/date

Similarly:

KICKSTART_WRAPPER="mpiexec -n 16 tau_exec --io"
./pegasus-kickstart pegasus-mpi-keg ...

Should be the same as:

./pegasus-kickstart mpiexec -n 16 tau_exec --io pegasus-mpi-keg ...