Matteo Melani
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In 2003, after a year and a half of traveling around the world, Matteo Melani started work in Italy implementing a computing structure for the BaBar experiment and teaching undergraduate students about computer science. To get freshman physicists interested in his class, he looked for connections between the two fields and discovered the world of grid computing. Soon after that class, his Italian university sent him to work on BaBar databases at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California, and a six-month stint turned into a full-time research software architect position at SLAC working on grid computing.
"My main focus now is the accounting system for the Open Science Grid," said Melani. "I'm also working with a group of ATLAS physicists exploring the idea of making SLAC a Tier 2 computing site for that experiment, and with BaBar experimenters interested getting their software running on the OSG."
Melani and Philippe Canal from Fermilab co-chair the OSG accounting activity, which is gathering requirements and designing an accounting system for the U.S. infrastructure. To achieve the OSG goals of bringing together a many institutions and universities and linking consumers and providers of resources, the infrastructure must provide a reliable way to track the usage of those resources.
"Let me give you an example—let's say I manage a cluster of 32 machines, and I want to devote those machines to the OSG," said Melani. "Buying and maintaining the machines costs me some money, so at the end of the year I'd like to be able to say that they have helped these specific scientific projects by providing this amount of CPU time and that amount of storage space."
Melani sees the OSG eventually supporting a full economic model, but accounting on the grid is still relatively new and technically challenging.
"Telecommunication networks have done accounting for many years, but they own their own networks," explained Melani. "The grid connects across the Internet, which isn't controlled by a single organization. In addition, the OSG doesn't have a top-down management structure, which makes things more challenging as each local site has to remain in control of its own security."
—Katie Yurkewicz
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