System resource accounting in a heterogeneous distributed computing environment

The accounting tool, SAT, is designed to perform system resource accounting in a large, heterogeneous, distributed computing environment. The paper describes the design, implementation and operation of SAT. The tool is currently operational at Supercomputer Education And Research Centre (SERC) at Indian Institute Of Science. SERC is a large academic computing centre catering to the computing needs of the students and faculty, as well as to those of several paying users. SAT is equipped with both command line and graphical user interfaces. The software is developed using C-shell, Tcl, Expectk (Expect with TK), demonstrating the usability of these development languages. It is currently being used in an environment of a few hundred computers comprising SGI Iris, Indy, Indigo and Onyx machines, SUN Sparc20s, IBM RS6000s, a DEC VAX 8810, etc. Besides, the work brings out certain vagaries of connect time accounting in UNIX systems and the quality results of the software development process followed.