Scalable Grid‐wide capacity allocation with the SweGrid Accounting System (SGAS)

Abstract

SUMMARYThe SweGrid Accounting System (SGAS) allocates capacity in collaborative Grid environments by coordinating enforcement of Grid-wide usage limits as a means to offer usage guarantees and prevent overuse. SGAS employs a credit-based allocation model where Grid capacity is granted to projects via Grid-wide quota allowances that can be spent across the Grid resources. The resources collectively enforce these allowances in a soft, real-time manner. SGAS is built on service-oriented principles with a strong focus on interoperability and Web services standards. This article covers the SGAS design and implementation, which, besides addressing inherent Grid challenges (scale, security, heterogeneity, decentralization), emphasizes generality and flexibility to produce a customizable system with lightweight integration into different middleware and scheduling system combinations. We focus the discussion around the system design, a flexible allocation model, middleware integration experiences and scalability improvements via a distributed virtual banking system, and finally, an extensive set of testbed experiments. The experiments evaluate the performance of SGAS in terms of response times, request throughput, overall system scalability, and its performance impact on the Globus Toolkit 4 job submission software. We conclude that, for all practical purposes, the quota enforcement overhead incurred by SGAS on job submissions is not a limiting factor for the job-handling capacity of the job submission software.

The Reservoir model and architecture for open federated cloud computing

“…However, Reservoir will strive to overcome interoperability challenges often posed in traditional grids by a very strict separation of concern and by minimal interfaces, reducing cross-site concerns to a minimum. Reservoir also needs to expand substantially on the current state of the art for grid-wide accounting [20] and increase flexibility to support different billing schemes and accounting for services with indefinite lifetimes (as opposed to finite jobs) with support to account for utilization metrics relevant for VMs.…”

Developing Resource Usage Service in WLCG

“…These two accounting systems became part of the gLite middleware, the common software stacks shared by both EGEE and WLCG projects. SweGrid Accounting System (SGAS) [7] is another grid accounting system designed for SweGrid, the national grid test-bed in Sweden, and used as the major accounting solution for the NorduGrid [8] infrastructure.…”

DQMP: A Decentralized Protocol to Enforce Global Quotas in Cloud Environments

“…For good resource utilization and to prevent overload of the quota server bank, this requires previous knowledge about the resource demand. Gardfjäll et al [15] developed the SweGrid accounting system that manages resources via a virtual bank that handles a hierarchical project namespace using branches. Based on an extended name service, each branch can be hosted on a separate node.…”