Bridging the Adoption Gap – Developing a Roadmap for Trading in Grids

Abstract

Grid computing describes a computing model that distributes processing across an administratively and locally dispersed infrastructure to create virtual supercomputers at low cost. However, currently Grids are mainly employed within enterprises to connect internal divisions and business units. This paper attempts to explain why Grid market initiatives have failed. The explanation mainly focuses on the object traded in Grid markets. What is needed to extend Grid technologies beyond company borders is a set of mechanisms that enable users to discover, negotiate and pay for the use of Grid services on demand. This paper derives a roadmap for the design of market mechanisms based on a solid understanding of the technical possibilities. This roadmap underlines the need for a catalogue of market mechanisms to increase the impact of Grid markets in commercial settings.

Keywords:

• grid computing
• service markets
• market engineering
• electronic markets

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This work has partially been funded by EU‐IST programme under grant 034286 ‘SORMA‐Self Organizing ICT Resource Management’.

Notes

1. http://www.top500.org/, accessed on 18 September 2007.

2. http://www.network.com/, accessed on 18 September 2007.

3. Quite recently, Sun has been facilitating access to customers in 25 countries. It remains to be seen if the removal of legal concerns will result in broader adoption.

4. Grid Services are stateful extensions of Web Services (http://www.globus.org/ogsa/, accessed on 18 September 2007).

5. See http://forge.gridforum.org/sf/projects/glue‐wg, accessed on 18 September 2007.

6. See http://www.ogf.org/documents/GFD.56.pdf, accessed on 18 September 2007.

7. See http://www.mosix.org, accessed on 18 September 2007.

8. We use the term ‘market structure’ to denote the configuration of marketplaces.

9. It should be noted that there could be n‐intermediate markets. We consider only the extreme cases, as they exhibit different characteristics.

10. Enabling Grids for eScience, http://www.eu‐egee.org/, accessed on 18 September 2007.

11. http://www.cdo2.com/, accessed on 18 September 2007.

12. http://www.gigaspaces.com/, accessed on 18 September 2007.

13. Informally, for a complex/large problem instance, the allocation problem is not solvable with justifiable effort.

14. Software‐as‐a‐service refers more to model of software delivery where a service provider (e.g. SAP) offers to requesters applications that are specifically implemented for one‐to‐many hosting.