The Gridbus Project at the University of Melbourne has developed a Grid
accounting services architecture.
"It is a must for commercial Grid computing, but it was one of the
missing components in today's Grid computing, so this fills the gap,"
said program leader Rajkumar Buyya.
According to a paper authored by Buyya, of the Grid Computing and
Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Lab at the University of Melbourne, and
Alexander Barmouta of the University of Western Australia, Computer
Science and Software Engineering University of Melbourne, computational
Grids are emerging as the new infrastructure for Internet-based parallel
and distributed computing. They enable the sharing, exchange, discovery,
and aggregation of resources distributed across multiple administrative
domains, organizations and enterprises.
To accomplish this, Grids need an infrastructure that supports various
services: security, uniform access, resource management, scheduling,
application composition, computational economy, and accountability, they
said. Many Grid projects have developed technologies that provide many
of these services with the exception of accountability.
Buyya and Barmouta proposed a new infrastructure they called GridBank.
Its components include:
- The Grid Resource Meter, which extracts resource usage information
from the operating system and converts it into a Grid-wide standard
form.
- The GridBank Charging Module, which is responsible for determining
legitimacy of payment instruments passed to it by the GridBank Payment
Module, setting up and removing (after execution of user application)
temporary local accounts, calculating total charge using the Resource
Usage Record and the service rates passed by the Grid Trade Service, and
redeeming the payment with the GridBank server.
- The GridBank Payment Module, which receives requests for job execution
from the Grid Resource Broker, obtains a payment instrument from the
GridBank, forwards the payment to the GridBank Charging Module and
submits the job when the charging module notifies it that a local
account has been set up. The Grid Trade Server negotiates service
cost/rates with the Grid Resource Broker and provides interface for the
charging module to obtain the information. Negotiation protocols are
already defined in, they said.
In the future, the GridBank system will be expanded to provide multiple
servers/branches across the Grid to achieve scalability in a similar
manner as the currency servers in NetCash and NetCheque systems, Buyya
and Barmouta said.
Information on the Gridbus project can be found at
http://www.gridbus.org, and the GridBank article can be found at
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~raj/papers/gridbank.pdf.
SDSC Storage Resource Broker Integrated with Globus GridFTP to
Support TeraGrid
Data and Knowledge Systems researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer
Center have collaborated with the GridFTP development team at the Globus
Project to develop driver functions to integrate the SDSC Storage
Resource Broker (SRB) with the GridFTP protocol.
This work, part of the National Science Foundation-supported Distributed
Terascale Facility, or TeraGrid project, will help enable the
next-generation computational grid to advance open scientific
research.
"This is an important step in integrating the proven SRB with the grid
infrastructure of Globus," said Arcot Rajasekar, director of the Data
Grid Technologies Group in SDSC's Data and Knowledge Systems (DAKS)
program. "One key to realizing the potential of grids is the ability to
create a uniform environment, and the real strength of the SRB is its
ability to interoperate and connect to a very broad range of
heterogeneous and distributed systems."
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