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From SGAS

SGAS is an accounting system for maintaining a grid-wide view of the resources consumed by members of a virtual organization.

The information gathered by the accounting system can serve several purposes, such as to allow enforcement of project quotas or to provide a basis for grid resource brokering decisions. In SGAS, user projects are allocated a certain amount of computer time per month after a peer-reviewed application process. These node hour allocations may be used by one or several of the project members on some or all of the resources, in any combination. The accounting system's grid-wide view enables, e.g., strict enforcement of project allocations.

One of the components of the accounting system is the bank service. The bank is designed as an online service, handling the accounts of all associated projects. Each grid job submission is transparently intercepted by the accounting system, which acquires a reservation on a portion of the project account prior to job execution. Upon job completion, the project account is charged for the consumed resources and the reservation is released. Complexity is added to the problem by the distributed resource administration, the fact that different resources use different mappings from grid user accounts to local user accounts, and that no other global control or monitoring facility is available.

The bank is general with respect to what resources and type of quantities it can handle, i.e., its design is not restricted to accounts for node hours on computers. Additional resource types can easily be accounted for. Different kinds of resources can either be converted into a single currency (grid credits), or separate accounts can be kept for a project's computer usage, storage utilization, etc. It also allows for alternative policies on how strict the enforcement on project quotas should be. The system design is based on the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and implemented using Globus Toolkit 4. For more details about the system, including more detailed features, performance aspects, and scalability, see Documentation.

SGAS in included as a technical preview component in the Globus Toolkit 4.