Towards Integrated Resource Accounting in NFDI

After nearly five years of development, the NFDI as a whole, along with its participating consortia and services, has reached a level of maturity that now calls for sustainable service design. A key example of this evolution is the progress made in the area of Authentication (ensuring the identity of users accessing resources) and Authorisation (controlling which users may access specific resources). Within the Base4NFDI framework (https://base4nfdi.de/), this has been advanced through the IAM4NFDI service initialization and integration phase. The solutions build on existing Community Authentication and Authorization Infrastructures (CAAI), reflecting the growing collaboration among the NFDI consortia. To further integrate services across providers, establish a foundation for offering and accessing services, and enable the long-term development of specialised providers, we require an overview of individual resource consumption. Discussions within the section "Common Infrastructure" sparked the idea of complementing the IAM4NFDI initiative with work on accounting. The latter refers to the logging of resource usage within a federation and has ties to Authentication and Authorisation—completing the "AAA" framework (with Accounting as the third A). Our key motivations for introducing federated accounting include: • Fostering cross-consortia cooperation in service provisioning, • Avoiding overreliance on commercial hyperscalers, • Enabling cost recovery, fair resource allocation, and usage transparency, • Creating the foundation for a flexible and sustainable service marketplace. Accounting is already a topic of interest in several contexts, including EOSC Future and EOSC EU Nodes, AARC, bwCloud, Helmholtz (HiFIS) frameworks and initiatives. There are already several existing tools and approaches that should be analysed for their applicability. An important point is also the integrability into existing components of IAM4NFDI. With these intentions in mind following tools will be evaluated: • JARDS – Software for resource allocation, • FURMS – Fenix User and Resource Management Service, • Waldur and ColdFront – Cloud and HPC management platforms, • GRNET's EOSC Future solution. • The four NFDI-CAAI solutions: AcademicID, didmos, RegApp and Unity, To effectively address these needs, future discussions and planning should consider the following aspects: • Utilising existing authorisation frameworks for efficient resource allocation and usage control, • Designing a resource allocation workflow where authenticated users can compile a "shopping cart" of required resources, subject to approval by their home organisation, • Providing real-time monitoring and forecasting of resource usage, • Generating usage reports for specific periods, • Developing a cooperative legal framework. Coordination within NFDI is crucial to prevent fragmentation and overhead, and to ensure that smaller user groups can easily access essential resources backed by core funding. Many computing centers within NFDI already have substantial experience in these areas, providing a strong basis for further development. A working group has been formed to evaluate current solutions and aims to propose and implement a federated, NFDI-wide accounting solution as part of a Base4NFDI project. A respective application is in the works. Members currently include staff from AIP, DAASI, GWDG, FZ Jülich, KIT, RWTH Aachen, and the University of Freiburg, representing consortia such as DataPLANT, NFDI4Ing, NFDI-MatWerk, Text+, NFDIxCS, and Biodiversity. For governance and coordination a close collaboration with the Task Force on Governance and Sustainability as well as the working group within Section Comon Infrastructure Overall Architecture would be fruitful. The recent DFG call for storage systems also highlights the necessity of a coordinated and overarching concept for accounting within the NFDI.