Accounting and Billing in Computing Environments

Abstract

This chapter gives a comprehensive overview of the current status of accounting and billing for up-todate computing environments. Accounting is the key for the management of information system resources. At this stage of evolution of accounting systems it is adequate not to separate computing environments into High Performance Computing and Grid Computing environments for allowing a “holistic” view showing the different approaches and the state of the art for integrated accounting and billing in distributed computing environments. Requirements resulting from a public survey within all communities of the German Grid infrastructure, as well as from computing centres and resource providers of High Performance Computing resources like HLRN, and ZIVGrid, within the German e-Science framework, have been considered as well as requirements resulting from various information systems and the virtualisation of organisations and resources. Additionally, conceptual, technical, economical, and legal questions also had to be taken into consideration. After the requirements have been consolidated and implementations have been done over one year ago, now the overall results and conclusions are presented in the following sections showing a case study based on the GISIG framework and the Grid- GIS framework. The focus is on how an integrated architecture can be built and used in heterogeneous environments. A prototypical implementation is outlined that is able to manage and visualise relevant accounting and billing information based on suitable monitoring data in a virtual organisation (VO) specific way regarding basic business, economic, and security issues.

Queueing Aspects of Integrated Information and Computing Systems in Geosciences and Natural Sciences

“…It has examined chances to overcome the deficits, built a collaboration framework and illuminated legal aspects and benefits (EULISP, 2011;Rückemann, 2010b). The information and instructions handled within these systems is one of the crucial points while systems are evolving by information-driven transformation (Mackert et al, 2009). For computing and information intensive systems the limiting constraints are manyfold.…”