Profile-Based Selection of Accountability Policies in Grid Computing Systems

Accountability in grid computing systems is an important requirement, in that it makes it possible to control activities of users and resource providers through the collection and analysis of accountability data. The accountability policies specify what to collect and when, and more importantly how to coordinate the data collection among different administrative domains. If elements of the data to be sent from a node to another are missing or different from the ones required by the policy due to the insufficient capabilities of the node to collect data, conflicts -- inability to comply - may occur. To solve such conflicts and yet obtain flexible accountability processes, we propose a profile-based policy selection mechanism. We show how by this mechanism we can adapt the accountability policies according to the specific features of jobs and nodes, while at the same time achieving a minimum level of accountability.