Engineering Grid Markets

Grids denote a promising concept to pool computer resources for joint computations. Facing increasingly more complex and demanding resources, Grids are deemed the solution to those problems by a more efficient and flexible usage of already existing resources. From a technical perspective Grid middleware have made significant progress. While in former implementations it was only possible to share idle resources (e.g. using Condor), new Grid middleware allow advance reservation of resources that are once committed not usable locally for the committed time (e.g. GRAM in Globus Toolkit 4.0). Advance reservation thus allows the sharing of not only idle resources but of all designated resources. The contribution of this paper is threefold. Firstly, this paper derives a requirement list stemming from Grid applications that need to be fulfilled by the market-based Grid. Secondly, the paper compares related work with the above requirements. Thirdly, and most importantly, this paper provides a fully-fledged market mechanism that is tailored to the use in service-oriented Grids.