Economic Modeling of Grid Services

Abstract

The open and global nature of the Internet provides the possibility of developing and using many new services (such as Grid services) to any user. These users can be the general public, academic institutions, SMEs, or larger organisations. Grid services could range from a simple service charged at low rate but aiming for mass usage to complex services encapsulating e-Science or HPC methods. Similarly, purchasers of such services could be from the general public, academia, or industry as well. Importantly, however, all services would be generally available; there would be no vertical segmentation of the service market according to user or service type. The ability to utilise remote Grid Utility Computing platforms frees both the service provider and the user from the need to own or acquire the necessary computational infrastructure. This paper describes the approach of GridEcon, a European Union funded project on Grid computing, that will build market-based, service-oriented Grid technology. Currently, since Grid computing suffers from not being used for commercial purpose at large scale, it reduces the benefit of Grid Computing. GridEcon offers a set of solutions to this shortcoming that are based on economic principles. This type of economics-aware Grid will create additional value for its participants by fully exploiting the economic value of the resources and providing the basis for developing creative, new business models of the next-generation Internet.