JISC

The grid accounting and usage study was a three-month project funded by JISC to perform a Review of Accounting and Usage Monitoring. The objectives were to address the following topics:

• An analysis of stakeholders and their requirements;
• The identification of key metrics and a framework within which they could fit;
• An assessment of current tools and how they could work or be re-tasked to work within the framework;
• Recommendations for further work to create an eventual solution.

The stakeholder review was conducted through visits, teleconferences, email, and via a questionnaire. Feedback was received from over forty people, from various stakeholder groups including national, regional and campus grid services, EDINA, MIMAS, NeSC, OMII-UK, OMII-Europe, and grid accounting software developers. From these discussions, the major requirements are deemed to be:

• Standards should be used where possible to maximise interoperability. However deficiencies identified by the stakeholders must be addressed both through extensions to the standards and by other means if necessary
• The solution should be lightweight and not prescriptive, and should not compromise performance.
• Further development is required to address the longer term requirements for data and service accounting.

A wide range of tools was reviewed. Most of these tools require specific software for deployment, and have been developed in conjunction with a particular community, The deployment of a specific tool may subsequently limit interoperability, although progress in adopting the standards (an objective of OMII-Europe) will assist in this. Similarly, because of the investment in a tool, once deployed there may be reluctance to subsequently consider using an alternative. Thus the reviewers believe it is not appropriate to recommend the adoption of a single tool for the UK communities.

The motivation behind the recommendations is to provide a solution that adopts the standards and assists the services in their deployment, without being prescriptive in the use of specific software. The key recommendations are:

• Standards - JISC should provide support, including funding for the involvement of UK community in the OGF UR and RUS working groups, to ensure that their general needs and key outstanding issues are addressed.
• Accounting Framework - JISC should fund the development of an accounting framework, that will assist deployments based on the standards specifications.
• Client/Usage Monitoring Framework - JISC should fund the development of a client based usage monitoring/management framework to provide a common basis for monitoring related activities.

In addition the report recommends:

• A steering group comprising members from different stakeholder groups such as NGS, regional and campus grid, the HPC-SIG and others should be set up to oversee future developments.
• JISC should consider establishing an advisory or support service, which provides a focus of expertise and assistance to those wishing to deploy such software, to encourage greater co-operation.

With respect to the funding of further work on behalf of the UK communities, the reviewers believe that without a co-ordinated, funded approach, there is a strong likelihood that different services will adopt their own solutions, resulting in many different developments and much duplication of effort. Thus there is a strong case to support such developments.

The output of the project is a final report below.