[gold-users] possibility to have a one-to-many relationship between allocation and projects?

[Scott Jackson]

Hi Ingmar,

ingmar wrote:
> Hello,
> I was wondering if anyone might have an idea on this one?  Gold supports 
> the idea of accounts having many allocations, and a project having an 
> allocation if it has just one account.

Technically, a project does not have allocations. Only accounts have 
allocations. Because we believed that some sites would like to think of 
projects as having allocations (credits) directly, we created a few 
mechanisms to simplify the perceived relationships so it would seem like 
funds were being associated directly with the projects. In reality, what 
we did was to enable by default a configuration parameter called 
account.autogen which, if enabled, would automatically create a single 
account each time a new project was created. Additionally, we added a 
"-p" option to gdeposit so that you could believe that you were 
depositing into a project. In reality, it simply looked up the accounts 
that were associated with the specified project, and if there was only 
one, it would use that account.

So to be precise -- Accounts are the only things that have allocations.

>   The hierarchy seems to be 
> Project -> account(s) where each account can have one or more 
> allocation.  
The hierarchy really is more like:

An Account is associated with one or more Projects, Users, Machines and 
Allocations.

As you stated, each account can have one or more allocations. It can 
also be associated with more than one Project...

> It is also possible to have an account with a child account 
> and then allocations associated to the child account.

I assume you are talking about nested accounts. Yes.

>   We have a current 
> business model where a division within the organization is 
> allocated/deposited a certain number of computing units.  This 
> allocation is then divided amongst different projects and in turn 
> accounts related to the projects.  It is nearly like the hierarchy 
> supported by Gold is 'turned upside down'.  My management wants to know 
> if this sort of business model could be supported by Gold?

I think so, but I will have to have you explain it further. Please give 
a very simple example that illustrates the concept for a small number of 
accounts/projects/allocations. I think I understand the general idea 
(university A has 100 credits, subdivided with 50 going to arts and 50 
to sciences, and of the 50 to sciences, we have 10 that actually go to 
each of 5 different science departments (physics, biology, chemistry, 
and so forth). When you say the allocation is divided, how does this 
differ in actual behavior from actually putting the credits directly in 
the leaf accounts (biology, chemistry, etc)?

>   After seeing 
> the default hierarchy I would say no, not even with modification to the 
> database?  Our business model is counter to one of the fundamental 
> concept on which Gold is built?  I am thinking without a large amount of 
> code modification to Gold, this business model could not be supported?  
> Any thoughts or comments from other sites and their implementations?
> Thanks,
> -Ingmar Thompson NCAR
> ____________________
Thanks,

Scott

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