Abstract
The accelerated development in Grid and peer-to-peer computing has positioned
them as promising next generation computing platforms. They enable the creation
of Virtual Enterprises (VE) for sharing resources distributed across the world.
However, resource management, application development and usage models in these
environments is a complex undertaking. This is due to the geographic
distribution of resources that are owned by different organizations. The
resource owners of each of these resources have different usage or access
policies and cost models, and varying loads and availability. In order to
address complex resource management issues, we have proposed a computational
economy framework for resource allocation and for regulating supply and demand
in Grid computing environments. The framework provides mechanisms for optimizing
resource provider and consumer objective functions through trading and brokering
services. In a real world market, there exist various economic models for
setting the price for goods based on supply-and-demand and their value to the
user. They include commodity market, posted price, tenders and auctions. In this
paper, we discuss the use of these models for interaction between Grid
components in deciding resource value and the necessary infrastructure to
realize them. In addition to normal services offered by Grid computing systems,
we need an infrastructure to support interaction protocols, allocation
mechanisms, currency, secure banking, and enforcement services. Furthermore, we
demonstrate the usage of some of these economic models in resource brokering
through Nimrod/G deadline and cost-based scheduling for two different
optimization strategies on the World Wide Grid (WWG) testbed that contains
resources located on five continents: Asia, Australia, Europe, North America,
and South America.