A Combinatorial Exchange for Complex Grid Services

The Grid is a promising concept to solve the dilemma of increasingly complex and demanding applications being confronted with the need for a more efficient and flexible use of existing computer resources. Even though Grid technologies have made progress within the context of large enterprises and academic projects, there has not yet been a widespread adoption by public institutions and small enterprises. One barrier to this adoption is the lack of economic paradigms which support the dynamic and efficient sharing of Grid resources by balancing resource scarcity and idle capacities. Economic algorithms promise to provide a good fit to the Grid's inherent strategic dimension by enabling users to express their valuation for computer resources. At the same time they provide incentives to contribute idle resources to the Grid in return for the market price. This paper presents a market-based approach for trading complex computational Grid services. The implemented combinatorial exchange aims at maximizing the social welfare of users. At its core, it provides a rich bidding language which is able to represent complex Grid services and simple workflows. The allocation mechanism is evaluated by means of a numerical experiment in order to gain detailed insights into the computational complexity of the underlying allocation problem. Our analysis provides input for the configuration of Grid markets.