Accounting of Computing Resources with AUDITOR

¹ Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
² Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, Karlsruhe, Germany
³ Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany
⁴ Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany

^* e-mail: michael.boehler@physik.uni-freiburg.de

Published online: 7 October 2025

Abstract

New strategies for the provisioning of compute resources, e.g. in the form of dynamically integrated resources enabled by the COBalD/TARDIS software toolkit, require a new approach of collecting accounting data. AUDITOR, a flexible and expandable accounting ecosystem that can cover a wide range of use cases and infrastructures, has been developed specifically for this purpose. Accounting data are collected via so-called collectors and stored in a database. So-called plugins can access the data and act based on the accounting information. Access to the data is handled by the core component of AUDITOR, which provides a REST API together with a Rust and a Python client library.

An HTCondor collector, a Slurm collector and a TARDIS collector are currently available, and a Kubernetes collector is already in the works. The APEL plugin enables, for example, the creation of APEL accounting summaries and their transmission to the APEL accounting server. Although the original aim for the development of AUDITOR was to enable the accounting of opportunistic resources managed by COBalD/TARDIS, it can also be used for standard accounting of a WLCG computing resource. As AUDITOR uses a highly flexible data structure to store accounting data, extensions such as GPU resource accounting can be added with minimal effort.

This contribution provides insights into the design of AUDITOR and shows how it can be used to enable a number of different use cases.