Development of a billing framework for D-Grid Prof. Dr. Gabriele von Voigt, Dr. Claus-Peter R

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Development of a billing framework for D-Grid
Prof. Dr. Gabriele von Voigt, Dr. Claus-Peter
Rückemann, Wolfgang Müller
Cracow Grid Workshop 2006 (CGW2006) 15th-18th
October 2006
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Overview

• The D-Grid Initiative
• Motivation
• Scientific background
• Existing billing concepts and solutions
• Resulting concept of the D-Grid billing framework
• Summary and future developments

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The D-Grid Initiative - Overview

• InGrid
• MediGRID
• TextGrid

• AstroGrid-D
• C3-Grid
• HEP-Grid

DGI Integration Project of D-Grid
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The D-Grid Initiative - German Core Grid sites
Site Resource Amount
FZJ/ZAM IBM Supercomputer with 8,5 TFlops STK data robot system with 2,8 PByte 32 CPUs 300 TByte
FZK/IWR 8 nodes Opteron 2x2.2 GHz 8 processors of a system NEC SX-5 1 p630 with 4 processors 1 SX-6i to do tests 2 nodes Opteron 2x2.2 GHz to do tests 100 50 50 50 50
LRZ SGI high performance system with 20 TFlop/sIntel IA32 and IA 64 Cluster, IBM p690, SunFire 80 55 5
MPI/RZG IBM supercomputer with 4,5 TFlops, PC cluster with 2 TFlops Data robot system with 8 PByte 32 CPUs 400 TByte
PC² Cluster of 400 Xeon 64 Bit processors, high performance visualization and FPGAs 10
RWTH/RZ 2 SunFire 6900 with 24 UltraSPARC IV each 100
TU-Dresden/ZIH SGI O2K(56 proc)/O3K(192 proc.) T3E (64 proc) PC cluster with 30 processors,end off 2005 new system with 1000 proc. 10 20 20 2
Uni-H/RRZN PC-Cluster mit 64 CPUs assoc.
Uni-KA PC-Pool assoc.
FHG/ITWM assoc.
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Motivation

• Even scientific environments aim at
  sustainability and refinancing resource
• provision (especially after the funding period).
• For the owners of grid resources it is essential
  to
• generate incentives for the constant provision of
  grid services to meet the needs of grid resource
  consumers,
• enabling them to quest offers of resources of
  other providers when their own capacities are
  insufficient,
• allowing them to maximize their resource
  utilization by offering a competitive service
  access price in order to attract consumers, and
  as a consequence,
• reducing their total costs of ownership (TCO).
• The users (resource consumers) have the option of
  choosing
• the providers that best meet their requirements
  or
• between rental or self-procurement of computing
  resources.

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Scientific background

• Elements of the billing procedure
• 1. step
• receiving the usage data provided by the
  accounting
• 2. step
• pricing of the single entity of the accounting
  data based on the contract between resource
  provider and resource user (rating, tariff
  management, account management, contract
  management)
• 3. step
• determination of the overall price for the
  resource usage and presenting the invoice to the
  resource user (bill presentment)

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Existing billing concepts and solutions

• Data Grid Accounting System (DGAS)
• decentralised banking structure
• checking the creditability of the user by his
  bank account before job submission
• the resource provider can apply various pricing
  metrics (such as wall clock time, CPU time,
  memory, storage, network traffic)
• each resource provider can choose the preferable
  metric according to his pricing policy
• uses only grid credits as a virtual currency,
  provides no interface to common automated payment
  mechanisms (such as Paypal or Netcash)
• uses only gLite as a middleware

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Existing billing concepts and solutions

• SweGrid Accounting System (SGAS)
• decentralised banking structure
• checking the creditability of the user by his
  bank account before job submission
• creating holds on the bank account while job
  processing in order to avoid overspending of grid
  credits
• implemented within SweGrid and running within a
  production environment
• uses only grid credits as a virtual currency,
  provides no interface to common automated payment
  mechanisms
• uses only Globus toolkit as a middleware
• only one nearly homogenous resource type is used
  within the SweGrid
• only one metric (wall clock time per node) is
  used for pricing

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Existing billing concepts and solutions

• GridBank/GASA framework in the context of the
  Australian GRIDBUS project
• checking the creditability of the user by his
  bank account before job submission
• creating holds on the bank account while job
  processing in order to avoid overspending of grid
  credits
• the resource provider can apply various pricing
  metrics (such as wall clock time, CPU time,
  memory, storage, network traffic)
• uses virtual and real currencies
• open interface to existing payment handling
  systems
• enables different payment strategies (such as pay
  before use, pay as you go, post-payment)
• centralised grid bank server
• Globus toolkit as a middleware
• developed within the scope of the project but no
  production phase yet

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Resulting concept of the D-Grid billing framework

• Inquiry among the D-Grid resource provider and
  resource user (D-Grid communities and the German
  Core Grid Sites)
• The major features are
• payment after job submission but guaranteeing
  sufficient users funds before job submission
• necessary security from job submission up to
  payment between user, resource broker, resource
  provider and clearing institution
• various mechanisms of price building for resource
  providers
• ability to handle various currencies
• existence of clearing institutions (bank service,
  account management)
• installation of a procedure for the settlement of
  disputes and conflicts
• independent of the utilized middleware
• special emphasis on virtual currency for spending
  funded budgets

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Summary and future developments

• D-Grid needs an extended interpretation of
  billing up to the full payment process and has to
  take into account the German federal funding
  policy.
• A comprehensive billing solution for the mutual
  provision and usage of grid resources will be
  developed and implemented.
• A transparent and comprehensible billing
  framework for grid computing is going to be
  established.
• The aim is to supply a multiplicity of users,
  both from the scientific range and from the
  economy.
• Services will be offered by a multiplicity of
  providers.
• The project is funded by
• www.d-grid.de Thank you for your
  attention.