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IST Call 5 Preparatory Workshop on "Advanced Grid Technologies, Systems & Services"

Date: 31 January - 1 February 2005
Location: Hotel Carrefour de l'Europe, Grasmarkt 110, B-1000 Brussels

Parallel session on "Grid Economics and Business Models"
Monday January 31st 2005


Session organiser: Maria Tsakali

Abstract

As more and more companies will move their business applications onto the Grid, a new business ecosystem to handle this new marketplace is emerging. This ecosystem of resource selection, allocation, control, and payment is referred to as Grid Economics.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Grid, traditional means for managing the allocation of resources and charging for them may not be efficient. Individual organizations may be reluctant to disclose accurate information about resource cost and availability, and would like to use this information asymmetry to their advantage in order to consume more resources of others and offer less than the efficient level. Also, managing resources and creating the corresponding market at a local level is much easier than over a geographically distributed network especially when demand and availability for these resources is sporadic and depends on many different and unpredictable factors such as dynamic configurations of nodes due to performance variations etc. Therefore, the dynamic and real-time nature of the future Grid services and the unsuitability of current business models impose new requirements on the market mechanisms of the emerging Grid economy. The next generation Grid should take these new requirements into account and integrate into the Grid architecture the concepts of accounting, payments, trust, and quality of the underlying services. The lack of such mechanisms will slow down the emergence of new innovative business models that will fuel the young Grid economy.

This workshop will analyse the state-of-the-art in Grid Economics and Business Models, will identify major challenges to the acceleration of grid adoption and will propose specific areas where more research and development is necessary.

Issues to be addressed

Invited Speakers

Prof. John Darlington, Director, London e-Science Centre, Department of Computing , Imperial College (Email)
Plenary Keynote Speaker & Session Chairman
"The Web as a Market in Services" - to be presented at the Plenary session
Grid and e-Science technologies are developing ways in which complex computationally-based services can be simply presented and executed transparently on heterogeneous distributed resources. As Grid and WWW technologies converge on Web Services this opens up the interesting prospect that the next-generation Web could, in part, comprise a commercial market in pay-by-use Web Services.
This talk will review the technical and economic drivers that could make this possible and speculate on the type of markets these developments could engender.
Chris Kenyon, IBM Research, Zurich Research Lab (Email)
"Missing Pieces for Dynamic Large-Scale Optimization of Grid Resources"
The focus for Grid research has moved on from its starting point of demonstrating feasibility and attaining wide-spread conceptual acceptance. The perception is that compute Grids are a largely solved problem and attention shifted to data Grids and even Grid-ified databases. However, in one area the Grid is not on trajectory to fulfill its initial premise, that is, in the area of multi-institutional virtual organizations. By Grid use in multi-institutional virtual organization we mean resource sharing that crosses budget boundaries. Creating and bringing together dynamic financial and accounting data with application resource use has so far been minimal in commercial practice. Either Grid is simply yet another virtualization technology (YAVT) with no further value or else real value is not being exploited. We will describe what we perceive to be the significant challenges in moving Grid from YAVT to a truly adapted technology for multi-institutional virtual organizations. Not surprisingly we see these challenges as the linkage between organizational aspects and technology aspects where missing technology could enable realization of significant value. We will also lay out a research agenda to address these missing pieces.
Prof. Costas Courcoubetis, Dept of Computer Science, Athens University of Economics and Business (Email)
"Grid Economic Modelling issues and further research"
Grid Computing promises a flexible infrastructure for complex, dynamic and distributed resource sharing among independent organizations. But unless these organizations are provided with the right incentives, they may not share resources efficiently. This makes the understanding and modelling of the Grid economy both challenging and crucial. In this talk, we present the most important characteristics of the Grid market and discuss its analogues with similar markets (in electricity, p2p storage, etc). We also highlight those of its aspects that make the Grid resource allocation problem special and which require new modelling paradigms and solutions.
Dr. Jorn Altmann, Associate Professor, School of Information Technology, International University in Germany (Email)
"Economically Efficient Resource Allocation in Grid Computing"
The economics behind technologies such as Internet data centers and Grid computing has not been understood yet. In order to make utility computing successful, more research on Grid accounting systems, incentive schemes (policies), and economically efficient resource allocation is mandatory. The knowledge gained will enable operators of Internet data centers to compete as well as to collaborate in the same Grid market. This talk will outline the current state of art on economically efficient resource allocation and show the difficulties of operators of Internet data centers within the Grid to make economically efficient decisions. Currently, it is difficult, if not impossible, for them to know whether the purchase of a remote resource is more economically beneficial than reorganizing the resources locally, or even purchasing new hardware. Therefore, operators need to have tools, which support them in making business-optimized decisions about the operation of the system. These tools will allow them to align each decision with their companies' business model for competing in an (hopefully) incentive-scheme-based Grid market.
Steve Wallage, Research Director, the451Group, London, UK. (Email)
"Grid computing - commercial realities"
The 451 Group has conducted extensive analysis into the uptake and adoption of grid computing. This presentation will describe the vertical markets which have been the early adopters of grid computing, and the drivers for this business. It will analyze the implementations of these users and their longer term strategy regarding grid usage. The 451 Group has also conducted extensive research into what is holding back the acceleration of grid usage by these early adopters, and the initial adoption by other users. Some of these areas, such as organizational issues, business models and lack of awareness, rely on the industry promoting the benefits of successful grid adoption case studies. Other areas, such as software licensing and grid reference models, need the IT industry to work together. However, the other main group of challenges are what The 451 Group describes as the 'missing link' grid technologies. These include management, workflow and authorization, and are natural areas for future grid research.

Agenda

Invited Speakers

14:00
Welcome - Setting the scene
Session Chairman: Prof. John Darlington (PDF, 3.911KB)
14:10
Missing Pieces for Dynamic Large-Scale Optimization of Grid Resources
Chris Kenyon, IBM Research, Zurich Research Lab (PDF, 2.282KB)
14:30
Grid Economic Modelling issues and further research
Prof. Costas Courcoubetis, Dept of Computer Science, Athens University of Economics and Business (PDF, 106KB)
14:50
Economically Efficient Resource Allocation in Grid Computing
Dr. Jorn Altmann, School of Information Technology, International University in Germany (PDF, 215KB)
15:10
Grid computing - commercial realities
Steve Wallage, the451Group (PDF, 239KB)
15:30 - 16:00 Q & A
16:00 - 16:30 Coffee Break

Position Papers

16:30
Issac Chao, Polytechnic University of Catalunya, Spain & Torsten Eymann, University of Bayreuth, Germany
16:35
Achim Streit, Research Center Jülich (FZJ), Central Institute for Applied Mathematics (ZAM), Germany
16:40
Peter Gradwell & Julian Padget, Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, UK
16:45
Prof. Dr. Christof Weinhardt, Dr. Carsten Holtmann, Dr. Daniel Veit, Chair for Information Management and Systems (IW), University of Karlsruhe, Germany
16:50
Josep Martrat & Pilar Morales, ATOS ORIGIN, Spain
16:55
Prof. Sergei Gorlatch, University of Münster, Germany
17:00
Aaron (Ronnie) Eilat, Correlation-Systems Ltd., Israel
17:05 - 18:00 Discussions
18:00
Wrap-up
Session Chairman: Prof. John Darlington (PDF, 10KB)

Short CV's

Professor Darlington is Director of the London e-Science Centre based in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. The London e-Science Centre conducts a series of projects developing and applying e-Science and Grid technologies in a wide variety of application domains.
Professor Darlington's long-term research has been in the development of high-level software methods that allow the simple construction and efficient execution of complex high-performance applications. Previously Professor Darlington conducted pioneering work in functional programming languages, program transformation and parallel machine architectures.
Professor Darlington's current interests include the application of e-Science and Grid technologies to the public Internet and Web.

Chris Kenyon is a Research Staff Member at IBM Research, Zurich Research Laboratory (since 2000) and was previously at Schlumberger Austin Research and McGill University. He has a MCSE in Operations Research from University of Texas at Austin (1997), a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cambridge University (1989) and is a former Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge (Computer Modeling). His current research interests include price design for outsourcing contracts, Grid Economics, mathematical finance and real options. He has over 30 publications in journals, conference proceedings, book chapters, and patents and is a member of INFORMS and IEEE.

Prof. Costas A Courcoubetis is heading the Network Economics and Services Group and the Theory, Economics and Systems Lab at the Athens University of Economics and Business. He graduated from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, and received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1982 until 1990 he was Member of the Technical Staff in the Mathematical Sciences Research Center at Bell Laboratories, from 1990 until 1999 he was with the CS Department at the University of Crete in Heraklion, Greece, where he headed the Telecommunications and Networks Group at the Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, and since then he is with the CS Department at the Athens University of Economics and Business. His research interests include economics of communication networks, resource allocation and optimization, peer-to-peer computing, and regulation policy. He has participated in many projects related to pricing network services and the Internet. He is a co-author with Richard Weber of "Pricing Communication Networks: Economics, Technology and Modeling" (Wiley, 2003).

Jörn Altmann is currently a Professor at the International University in Germany, heading the group of Computer Networks and Distributed Systems. Prior to this, he taught computer networks at the University of California at Berkeley, worked as Senior Scientist at Hewlett-Packard Labs, and has been a postdoc at EECS and ICSI of UC Berkeley. During that time he worked on international research projects about pricing of network services. Dr. Altmann received his B.Sc. degree, his M.Sc. degree (1993), and his Ph.D. (1996) from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. Dr. Altmann's current research centers around Internet infrastructures and economics of Internet services.

Steve Wallage brings a wealth of knowledge to The 451 Group as Director of Research Services, with more than 14 years of experience as a technology analyst specializing in the worldwide telecommunications markets. Most recently, he was a principal analyst at Gartner Group, tracking the voice, data and IP services markets for the carrier, vendor and financial communities. Steve has developed and managed the 451 Special Reports, of which more than 15 have now been published. He has used his research experience to develop the depth of analysis within those reports. Both prior to and since joining the company, Steve has been a speaker and moderator at numerous industry and vendor events in Asia, Europe and the US. He is a regular commentator on telecom and IT issues for business television in the UK. Steve's career is rooted firmly in analysis. He has worked for a number of companies, including the Northern Business Information division of McGraw-Hill, where he managed the European research team. Prior to this, he worked for the Telematica program, which was owned successively by Logica, Intelidata, and Romtec. His positions within that group included Voice Networking Analyst, Business Development Manager and Research Manager. Steve has also worked for IDC in Australia and for IBM's marketing department. He has a degree in Business Administration from Bath University, UK." From a Grid perspective, Steve has also been involved in The 451 Group's Grid Adoption Research Service since its inception and as head of our Special Report section was instrumental in our Report, "Grids 2004: From Rocket Science to Business Service.


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