Grid computing has recently become an important paradigm for managing computationally demanding applications, composed of a collection of services. The dynamic discovery of services, and the selection of a particular service instance providing the best value out of the discovered alternatives, poses a complex multi-attribute n:m allocation decision problem, which is often solved using a centralized resource broker. To manage complexity, this article proposes a two-layer architecture for service discovery in such Application Layer Networks (ALN). The first layer consists of a service market in which complex services are translated to a set of basic services, which are distinguished by price and availability. The second layer provides an allocation of services to appropriate resources in order to enact the specified services. This framework comprises the foundations for a later comparison of centralized and decentralized market mechanisms for allocation of services and resources in ALNs and Grids.
The increasing interconnection between computers has created a vision for Grids. Within these Grids, computing resources such as processing power, storage space or applications are accessible to any participant. This accessibility has major ramifications for organizations since they can reduce costs by outsourcing nonessential elements of their IT infrastructure to various forms of service providers. Such emerging e-Utilities -providers offering on-demand access to computing resources -enable organizations to perform computational jobs spontaneously through other resources in the Grid that are not under the control of the (temporary) user (Foster et al., 2002).With the implementation of Grid middleware, institutional arrangements are becoming increasingly important. In essence, current Grid middleware provides insufficient incentive to participate in the Grid. In this context, the application of markets for the Grid is considered to work well. By assigning a value (also called utility) to their service requests, users can reveal their relative urgency or costs to the service, which is subject to service usage constraints. If the market mechanism is properly defined, users may be provided incentives to express their true values for service requests and offers. This in turn marks the prerequisite for attaining an efficient allocation of services, which maximizes the sum of aggregate valuations (Schnizler et al., 2005).MACE -a multi-attribute combinatorial exchange -is a suitable auction mechanism for allocating and scheduling resources in the Grid (Schnizler et al., 2006). In contrast to other approaches, the proposed mechanism accounts for the variety of services by incorporating 1 Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings 06461 Negotiation and Market Engineering
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.