Requirements for Accounting and Billing

1 Functional requirements

1.1 Resource Usage Collection

The Grid scheduling instance MUST be able to collect resource usage from the different local sites as well as usage data at the level of the scheduling instance itself. It must be able to query the accounting services acting for the local sites for usage information and it needs to keep a log about the usage of resources by the scheduling instance itself (what resources were reserved, for how long.. etc).

1.2 Resource Usage Accountability

The Grid scheduling instance MUST be able to associate resource usage with a user, a project or more generally and entity for accountability and billing. It needs also to support different level of accountability (for example, associating a resource used by a job with a user for troubleshooting in case of a problem and the same resource/job with a project for billing purposes)

1.3 Usage Record

The Grid scheduling instance MUST support a standard way to store usage data for exchanging the accounting information with other Grid entities.

1.4 Query Records

The Grid scheduling instance SHOULD permit Grid users and project administrators to query the scheduling instance for usage records.

1.5 Raw Data

The Grid scheduling instance SHOULD be able to access the raw data from which the accounting records were derived. As it may need to derive new records for some customized billing requirements (An explanatory example would be execution time as usage record and start time and end time as raw data from which the execution time was derived. The billing in this case would require the start time because resources cost less if used after 8 pm)

1.6 Taggable Records

The Grid scheduling instance SHOULD support tagging usage records or fields in the usage records as confidential (or anything else for that matter). Calculating a bill does not require exposing sensitive information that Grid users or resource owner would be reluctant to publish.

1.7 Quote Service

The Grid scheduling instance SHOULD support a quote service to permit users to ask for quotes before using a resource (ex: what would cost me to run such and such at that computing site?). The quote should not be binding and only be valid for a short period of time.

1.8 Conversion Function

The Grid scheduling instance MUST implement a conversion function that would convert from a usage record to a currency following a basic conversion scheme (1 CPU/hour cost 1 token for instance and negotiate the monetary value of the token depending on the economic model and the demand).

1.9 Conversion policies

The Grid scheduling instance SHOULD permit the resource owner to provide it with custom conversion models to better serve its interests.

1.10 Identifying the Entity to Be Charged

The Grid scheduling instance MUST permit the identification of the entity to be charged for the resource usage. User may belong to different VO and may run several jobs, it is important in this case to identify who should pay for every job. It may also occur that a job would get paid for from different budgets depending on the money availability for instance.

1.11 Payment Schemes

The Grid scheduling instance MUST at least support one payment scheme. Examples would be allowing post-payment, pre-payment (at reservation time for instance) or continuous payment.