[GSA-RG] Conf call

[Philipp]

Dear Rosario,

welcome to the GSA list then :-)

Please find my comments inline.

Rosario Michael Piro schrieb:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm quite new to the GSA-WG, that is, I actually never really 
> participated, but I subscribed since was interested in "economic 
> scheduling".
> 
> Philipp wrote:
>> Salut,
>>
>> we decided to continue with the scheduling requirements document 
>> focussing on scheduler instance interoperability. Responsibilities have 
>> been sent around last week, "accouting" and "monitoring" seem to be vacant.
> 
> Since I work on accounting, I have a question here.
> The term "accounting" can be used for two distinct, although related things:
> 1) keeping track of the resources consumed by grid users, i.e. 
> "accounting" as it is usually intended on computing systems (also 
> cluster systems, for example, where no money is involved)
> 2) in an economic context where users pay for consumed resources (being 
> it with real money or virtual credits).
> The latter should better be termed "charging and billing" than 
> accounting, but the terms are often mingled and used as equivalent. I 
> prefer to distinguish since one builds on top of the other. Charging and 
> Billing require accounting information (resource usage information), but 
> on the contrary accounting does not necessarily require a charging and 
> billing mechanism to be in place (although accounting records may 
> include information on job cost in case users are being charged).
I agree with your description. Actually we already separated this once, 
but for some reason the responsibilities made it one item 
"accouting/billing" again.

> Which of the two do you see in relation to the GSA? Are you interested 
> in using, for example, historical accounting information in order to 
> predict run times (there is some work on this, I can point you to some 
> papers, if you're interested) - then this would be accounting as 
> intended in point 1 - or are you more interested in market-oriented 
> resource allocation and economic scheduling (i.e. using price 
> information for scheduling decisions in order to respect budget 
> constraints)?
GSA being a research group is actually "interested" in both, 
"accounting" and "charging and billing", since both are potentially part 
of a Grid scheduling architecture. What we are actually working on is 
quite a different story, and sometimes the broad focus of the group is 
also a challenge...

But the current focus of the group is interoperability of schedulers, 
starting with the basic case (see e.g. the slides from OGF 21 on 
GridForge). In this case, we are dealing with "accounting", keeping 
track of the progress of a schedule.

But if you, in addition to pointers to papers, have e.g. a use case in 
the areas you mention (you may also check the group's use case document 
GFD.64), this would be very helpful. Ideally it tackles the problem of 
scheduler interoperation.

Best regards, Philipp.

> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Rosario.
> 
>> Guidelines:
>> - 1 to 2 pages
>> - focus: scheduling interoperability (see GSA GridForge: Working Drafts 
>> -> Grid Scheduling Architecture - Requirements -> GSA-requirements.doc)
>> - Each requirement section should contain a subsection "Existing OGF 
>> specifications" to set the respective requirement into context to what 
>> OGF has in this are. If there is a gap, name it.
>>
>> I will collect contributions and put them together. Deadline is 20-02-2008.
>>
>> Adios, Philipp.
>>
>> ps Everything else to be discussed at OGF.
>> Philipp schrieb:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> currently I have Nicola, Ramin and Wolfgang for today's call. Anybody 
>>> else who wants to join please send me a quick note or contact me via Skype.
>>>
>>> Thanks, Philipp.
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