An artificial economy, set up under a certain set of constraints in order to make it obey a certain set of economic principles, in which consumers are represented by users and their applications (or the Resource Brokers, or metaschedulers, on their behalf) and suppliers by the various Grid resource providers and their services (adapted from Woslki et al., 2003). Note that the term “computational economy” refers also to the utilization of computers to solve complex financial problems. In this article, however, it is intended exclusively to refer to artificial economies. In the context of Grid Computing, the term “Grid Economy” (Buyya et al., 2005) can be considered equivalent.
Published in Chapter:
Resource Usage Accounting in Grid Computing
Rosario M. Piro (INFN and University of Torino, Italy)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 11
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-184-1.ch018
Abstract
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.