Reimagining Account and Allocation Management for Advanced Research Computing

Though they are the backbone of a center’s infrastructure and store some of its most vital information, often times, the databases responsible for tracking project allocations, job accounting, storage commitments, and other core center information aren’t designed with the proper attention and thought to scale and adapt with the center as it grows and changes. Off-the-shelf solutions for these data stores are limited, and come with their own assumptions. As the field of research computing and thus the demands on the center continue to evolve, so to must the accounting solutions be able to accommodate the changing mission and goals. Many centers develop their own solutions in house, which requires additional effort to build and maintain. In this work, we present a data model which attempts to provide a more generalized solution to this problem, as well as a feature-rich set of tools provided by leveraging the powerful and widely-used Django web framework and ORM, which we call OpenAcct. We explore other solutions to this data management problem including both vendor-provided and in-house developed options. We then discuss the details of the data model, before demonstrating the capabilities of the application layer. Finally, future plans for the project are discussed.