What is Billing

Large, geographically distributed and heterogeneous computing infrastructures, such as the Grid, often span multiple organizations and administrative domains. In such infrastructures, resource usage accounting, i.e. keeping track of the resources consumed by single users or entire organizations, is a non-trivial but very important task. This chapter introduces some general aspects and discusses the fundamental requirements that need to be fulfilled in order to guarantee an accurate resource usage accounting. Typical accounting procedures and current practices are described along with other related issues such as the normalization of resource usage information, the standardization of accounting interfaces, billing and charging, resource pricing, market-oriented resource allocation and economic scheduling.