Gold is an open source Accounting and Allocation Manager developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as part of the Department of Energy (DOE) Scalable Systems Software Project (SSS). It allows managers and administrators to fine tune when, where, how and to whom their resources are to be shared and at what cost. Gold acts much like a bank with the currency measured in credits, with the credits representing anything from computational units or dollars. Gold supports familiar operations such as deposits, withdrawals, transfers and refunds. It provides balance and usage feedback to users, managers, and system administrators.
Gold can be used as a real-time debiting system in which jobs are charged at the moment of completion. When used in a multi-site (grid) environment, Gold facilitates trust by allowing lending organizations to manage what the costing rules are for usage of their resources and job submitters to determine how much their job is going to cost them before they start, ensuring all parties can agree to the transaction and giving each party a first-hand accounting record.
Features:
Rations resources to projects and users
Status:
Gold is currently in beta release. It is fully functional for use within a single organization, though some of its grid-related features are still in development. An new alpha web GUI is included in this release. The User's Guide has been expanded to include chapters on Installation, Roles, Passwords and general use of the gold control program (goldsh). A new FAQ-O-MATIC has been created to answer frequently asked questions and a bug/support queue is being manned on a best-effort basis.
RoadMap:
Q1 2004: First Gold alpha released (based on Java).
Q3 2004: Second Gold alpha released (based on Perl).
Q4 2004: Gold beta released.
Q2 2005: Gold scheduled for general release.
For More Information:
Contact Gary Skouson at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
See also the Gold Home Page at http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/docs/mscf/gold