Tracing resource usage by Grid users is of utmost importance — especially in the context of large-scale scientific collaborations such as within the High Energy Physics (HEP) community — to guarantee fairness of resource sharing, but many difficulties can arise when tracing the resource usage of distributed applications over heterogeneous Grid platforms. These difficulties are often related to a lack of interoperability of the accounting components across middlewares. This paper briefly describes the architecture and workflow of the Distributed Grid Accounting System (DGAS) [1] and evaluates the possibility to extend it with a Resource Usage Service (RUS) [2, 3] interface — according to the Open Grid Forum (OGF) specification — that allows to store and retrieve OGF Usage Records (URs) [4, 5] via Web Services. In this context the OGF RUS and UR specifications are critically analyzed. Furthermore, a prototype of a RUS interface for DGAS (DGAS-RUS) is presented and the mos...
Rosario M. Piro, Michele Pace, Antonia Ghiselli, A