https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201921407035
Quasi-online accounting and monitoring system for distributed clouds
University of Victoria,
3800 Finnerty Road, Victoria BC V8P 5C2,
CANADA
* e-mail: seuster@uvic.ca
Published online: 17 September 2019
The HEP group at the University of Victoria operates a distributed cloud computing system for the ATLAS and Belle II experiments. The system uses private and commercial clouds in North America and Europe that run OpenStack, Open Nebula or commercial cloud software. It is critical that we record accounting information to give credit to cloud owners and to verify our use of commercial resources. We want to record the number of CPU-hours of the virtual machine. We continuously collect the CPU usage and an estimate of the HEPSpec06 units of the VM obtained during the boot of the VM and uploads it into an Elastic Search database. The information is processed and published as soon as it is available. The data is published in tables and plots in Kibana and as a cross check in ROOT. We have found the system to be useful beyond gathering accounting information and can be used for monitoring and diagnostic purposes. For example, we can use it to detect if the payload jobs are stuck in a waiting state for external information. We will report on the design and performance of the system, and show how it provides important accounting and monitoring information on a large distributed system.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
