GridEcon - The Economic-Enhanced Next-Generation Internet

The major shortcoming of Grid middleware systems is the lack of economic-enhanced Grid services. These new services are necessary in order to let Grid users benefit from the properties of the Grid. Those properties comprise the availability of on-demand computational power, simplicity of access to resources, low cost of ownership, and a pay-for-use pricing model in addition to the already leveraged properties such as cost reduction and aggregated processing power for high-performance computing applications. This paper gives an overview of the EU-funded project GridEcon on Grid economics and business models. It describes its vision of the next generation Grid/Internet, in which individuals, universities, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), and large companies have access to the Grid in exactly the same way. Any resource, including servers, storage, software, or data, is accessible as a service. In addition to this, the architecture of an economic-enhanced infrastructure is illustrated and the goal of the project is described.