Service contracts and aggregate utility functions

A Grid Broker Pricing Mechanism for Temporal and Budget Guarantees

“…The SORMA project introduced two pricing schemes namely k-pricing [26,3] and the GREEDEX [28] clearing mechanism, though the most similar pricing mechanisms can be found in [6,23,14,5,1] where a service charge that diminishes once a job has passed a specified time is also used.…”

“…In [6,23,14,5,1] a completion time and rate of loss of a jobs economic value is used. Our approach uses a due date and deadline which is seen as more user friendly than asking for a rate by which a job loses its economic worth.…”

“…This concept of slack is first seen in [1], but a rate of decay is still considered, rather than seeing the decay rate as a product of a due date and deadline.…”

“…In [1] an aggregate utility function is used so the user may specify their sensitivity to not having all the tasks in a job been completed. This is seen by the authors to be beneficial in preventing the service provider from cherry picking only the most profitable jobs.…”

“…The first is a commercial scenario where computation is required to generate results which are relied upon as part of the business process, such as animation, where it is useful to have all frames computed overnight before the animation team arrive, where partial completion of the work delays or stops the team starting the next days work [1]. The second scenario is in an academic environment where it is common before conferences for Grids to become overloaded [10].…”