An OGSA-based bank service for grid accounting systems

This contribution presents the design and implementation of a bank service, constituting a key component in a recently developed Grid accounting system. The Grid accounting system maintains a Grid-wide view of the resources consumed by members of a virtual organization (VO). The bank is designed as an online service, managing the accounts of VO projects. Each service request is transparently intercepted by the accounting system, which acquires a reservation on a portion of the project's bank account prior to servicing the request. Upon service completion, the account is charged for the consumed resources. We present the overall bank design and technical details of its major components, as well as some illustrative examples of relevant service interactions. The system, which has been implemented using the Globus Toolkit, is based on state-of-the-art Web and Grid services technology and complies with the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA).