LinuxHPC.org/Cluster Builder 1.3 - Gold Allocation Manager

Gold Allocation Manager

Gold is an open source accounting system developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) which tracks resource usage on High Performance Computers and acts much like a bank, establishing accounts in order to pre-allocate user and project resource usage over specific nodes and time frames. Gold provides balance and usage feedback to users, managers, and system administrators.

Background

Gold was developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as open source software under the Scalable Systems Software (SSS) SciDAC project.

Gold was designed to meet the accounting needs of computing centers that share resources in multi-project environments. In order for an organization to use its high performance computers most effectively, it must be able to allocate resources to the users and projects that need them in a manner that is fair and according to mission objectives. Tracking the historical resource usage allows for insightful capacity planning and in making decisions on how to best meet these resources. It allows the funding sources that have invested heavily in a supercomputing resource a means to show that it is being utilized efficiently.

Gold was also designed to facilitate the sharing of resources between organizations or within a Grid to take advantage of the tremendous utilization gains afforded by meta-scheduling.

Integration

Some resource and workload managers may be able to integrate with Gold to track and charge job resource usage, providing greater control over who is using the cluster or grid resources. There are a number of common resource and workload managers that integrate with Gold, e.g., TORQUE, PBS Pro, Loadleveler, LSF, Maui Cluster Scheduler, Moab Workload Manager.

Features/Benefits

Gold has been designed to be flexible, featuring customizable accounting and support for a variety of accounting models. Attention has been given to scalability, security, and fault tolerance. Gold facilitates the sharing of resources between organizations or within a Grid providing distributed accounting while preserving local site autonomy.

Gold Feature Set:

Rations resources to projects and users

Accounts
Expiring Allocations
Nested Accounts

Supports real-time resource charging

Dynamic Charging
Reservations
Flexible Charging

Maintains historical usage records

Journaling

Empowers staff and saves time

Familiar Banking Operations
Web Interface
Transparency
Credit and Debit Accounts

Facilitates capacity planning

Project Cycles

Enables grid computing

Multi Site Exchange
Guaranteed Quotes

Highly customizable and flexible

Dynamic Customization
Powerful Querying

Emphasizes scalability, security and maintainability

Security
Role Based Authorization
Open Source

Status

Gold is freely available for download and is fully functional for use within a single organization. Some of the grid-related features are still in their infancy. The web GUI included with this release is based on Perl CGI(deprecating the Java JSP GUI). The User's Guide has been expanded to include a chapter on Customizing Gold Objects. Users can subscribe to Gold's mailing list or view the archives.

_{^{The information used to create this article was provided by Cluster Resources, Inc.}}