Accounting, ‘the last A’

John Gordon

Amsterdam Workshop, May 13th 2005

Den Haag White Paper

6.1. Introduction6.2. Usage Frameworks

6.2.1. Consortium models6.2.2. Economic Models6.2.3. Technical architecture

6.2.3.1. Banking services

6.2.3.2. Service measurements from the users point of view6.2.3.3. Benchmarks

6.2.4. Final thoughts

6.3. State of the art6.3.1. Telecommunications6.3.2. Supercomputing6.3.3. Grids

6.3.3.1. DGAS and SGAS

6.3.3.2. Market for Computational Services (MCS)

6.4. A Path to Convergence6.4.1.1. Deployment status6.4.1.2. Standardization work

6.5. Challenges and opportunities of the accounting mechanisms

6.6. Recommendations6.6.1. Extended use cases development6.6.2. Standards and ontology development6.6.3. Pilot Projects

Deployment

• EGEE has deployed APEL, an RUS, on its production service and the wider LCG.

• DGAS has been deployed in production on INFNGrid in Italy in anticipation of wider deployment in EGEE and on a prototype of the EGEE gLite middleware.

• SGAS has been deployed on SweGrid since before the last eIRG. Used by 5 Swedish supercomputers.

MCS

• A web services Record Usage Service (RUS) that has updated the specifications of the GGF RUS-WG working group from OGSI to WS-I standards.

• Tested the performance of this with insertion of a database of up to 3 million records where the scaling of insertion time is linear in this range. Extrapolate to be more than adequate for a Grid of the size of the NGS, possibly also will scale to the LCG size but would need further testing for this.

• We have submitted the RUS service as a possible RUS for the NGS and are awaiting evaluation of its suitability.

• Have tested services with PayPal.

APEL

• Record Usage Service (RUS)

• Processes logs for authenticated grid jobs

• Query portal, on demand views

• production EGEE/LCG

Standards

• The GGF UR-WG usage record was incorrectly described in the last white paper. It has now been adopted by a number of grid projects (EGEE, TeraGrid, NGS, OSG, SweGrid, NextGrid, LCG, NorduGrid, GridIT) and appears to be approaching a de facto standard. It will be interesting to compare their implementations for interoperability, comparison of extensions, subsets etc..

• GESA-WG has been in hibernation for some time and no progress has been made since November.

• RUS-WG has recently had a renewal of activity. The revised spec is on track for submission to the GGF editor in the near future.

• The relevant GGF work on negotiation is taking place in the GRAAP Working Group.

6.6. Recommendations

Accounting was introduced as a new subject in the eIRG at the Den Haag 2004 meeting. It is clear that work needs to continue to develop mature accounting schemes and gather experience on the grid market as a whole.

At this stage the following pilots and studies are recommended:• Gathering accounting best practices from existing consortia and

computing centres and transferring them to solutions based on open standards

• Detailed exploration of accounting use cases• Grid market pilots to identify bottlenecks and practical challenges in

the economic models• Pilots for utilisation of banking systems with grid resource billing• Studies on legislation issues concerning resource trading• Development of common vocabulary for accounting terminology• Intensifying international collaboration in defining common

accounting standards and interoperability between existing and future solutions

Accounting best practices

• Accounting best practices from existing consortia and computing centres and transferring them to solutions based on open standards

• MCS, NextGrid

Accounting use cases

• Detailed exploration of accounting use cases

• DGAS

Grid market pilots

• to identify bottlenecks and practical challenges in the economic models

• MCS

Resource Billing

• Pilots for utilisation of banking systems with grid resource billing

• MCS (PayPal)

Legislation

• Studies on legislation issues concerning resource trading

• NextGrid

Ontology

• Development of common vocabulary for accounting terminology

• NextGrid, DGAS, GGF

Standards

• Intensifying international collaboration in defining common accounting standards and interoperability between existing and future solutions

• Standards – everyone

• Collaborations - MCS/SGAS, APEL/OSG

Who?

• DGAS (EGEE, INFN)

• SGAS (SweGrid, NextGrid)

• APEL (EGEE/LCG/GridPP)

• MCS (UK Core programme)

• CoreGrid?

• DEISA?

• ????

Where Next?

• A small number of projects are maturing

• They cannot hope to investigate the whole set of possible financial models

• Do we find more volunteers and testbeds?

– The existing projects map onto existing Grids

– No large untapped pool of Grids.

• Or do we look for winners?

Going Forward

• New Projects should learn from what has been done, don’t repeat

• re-use components then strike out into new areas

• Get involved in GGF

Accounting Summary

• Accounting is still immature

• A small number of projects have made good progress in implementing usage recording systems.

• This work has fed back in the GGF standards procedure and standards are appearing

• Little work on economic models, banking, charging, pricing– therefore little progress on future polices– or plans for roadmap