Publications

S. Vazhkudai and G. von Laszewski, "A Greedy Grid - The Grid Economic Engine Directive," Preprint ANL/MCS-P886-0501, May 2001. [pdf]

The advent of national-scale "Computational Grid" infrastructures has helped deploy advanced services, beyond those taken for granted in today's Internet, such as: remote access to computers, wide area resource management, authentication, and directory services, thus enabling access and utilization of a variety of heterogeneous resources distributed over multiple domains. The availability of these services represents an opportunity to implement advanced services utilizing these basic Grid services. In this paper, we explore issues related to defining services that are based on economy and financial models in order to encourage further resource sharing among the administrative domains while also considering commodity PC's that are part of todays Internet. We propose an extendable architecture, The Grid Economic Engine Directive (Greed), that allows integration of various economy models within the same framework, exposing the services through secure protocols and policies. The services provided by this framework include, for example, a bartering service, a bidding service, and a trading service. We intend to develop components that can be integrated within a customizable Portal simplifying access to many of the services and propose to integrate the Greed economic middleware into the existing Globus metacomupting toolkit, thus enabling the application of economic paradigm to the Globus Computational and Data Grids. We further illustrate the applicability of the proposed Greed services by building a prototype business model as a higher-level application, using the economic middleware.