Introduction

The ‘Grid’concept is motivated by the process of coordinating resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic environments. The recently growing computational power requirements of various applications such as in science and technology research works has promoted the need for linking up high performance computational resources distributed across different organizations. This also implies that there is a need for a proper management and accountability of resource usage spanning across organizational border. In a business framework, accountability is often a pertinent issue for business planning and in turn has impacts on return of assets and investments.

An accounting system plays an important role in Grid computing as it helps both resource manager and users know how the Grid resource is utilized. However, using the current Grid infrastructure, users or resource managers can only have the raw information, such as those records in some complicated log files that is difficult to visualize and analyze and most of the information might not be suitable for accounting purposes, but it does not support information regarding a particular Grid job or user. For leveraging the resource management and supporting Grid job analysis, a monitoring system on resource usage is vital as the fundamental building block for a grid accounting system.

In this project, we present our concrete development of a Grid accounting system. It is worth noting that our focus here is on the development of a tool that will enable managers to monitor and eventually meter, charge, and account for the resource sharing across multiple organizations.  Some additional features such as reporting and visualization tools are also included in the implementation.