The Gridbus Middleware for Market-oriented Computing

Grids aim at exploiting synergies that result from the cooperation of autonomous distributed entities. The synergies that result fromGrid cooperation include the sharing, exchange, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed resources such as computers, databases, software, and scientific instruments for solving large-scale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. For this cooperation tobe sustainable, participants need to have economic incentives. Therefore, “incentive” mechanisms should be considered as one of the key design parameters for designing and developing end-to-end Grid architectures. Although several studies have investigated marketoriented management of Grids, they were limited mostly to specific aspects of the system design such as service pricing or price-aware scheduling. This chapter presents architectural models, mechanisms, algorithms, and middleware services developed by the Gridbus project for end-to-end realization of market-oriented Grid computing. Grid technologies such as Globus provide capabilities and services required for the seamless and secure execution of a job on heterogeneous resources. However, to achieve the complete vision of Grid as a utility computing environment, a number of challenges need to be addressed. They include designing Grid services capable of distributed application composition, resource brokering methodologies, policies and strategies for scheduling different Grid application models, Grid economy for data and resource management, application service specification, and accounting of