The first single-source reference covering the state of the art in grid and utility computing economy research This book presents the first integrated, single-source reference on market-oriented grid and utility computing. Divided into four main parts—and with contributions from a panel of experts in the field—it systematically and carefully explores: Foundations—presents the fundamental concepts of market-oriented computing and the issues and challenges in allocating resources in a decentralized computing environment. Business models—covers business models for service providers and brokers supporting different types of distributed applications, as well as business rules-based models for managing virtual organizations and accounting operations and services in grid computing environments. Policies and agreements—introduces policies, agreements, and specifications for the negotiation and establishment of contracts between providers and consumers. It also covers different approaches for resource allocation based on service-level agreements (SLAs) and management of risks associated with SLA violations. Resource allocation and scheduling mechanisms—covers economic models, such as commodity models, reciprocation, auctions, and game theory, and middleware technologies, such as Nimrod/G and Gridbus, for market-oriented grid computing and utility-oriented resource allocation. This book expertly captures the state of the art in the field while also identifying potential research directions and technologies that will facilitate the creation of global commercial grid and utility computing systems. It is an indispensable reference for systems architects, practitioners, developers, new researchers, and graduate students.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Contemporary Computing, IC3 2010, held in Noida, India, in August 2010.

"This book provides a compendium of terms, definitions, and explanations of concepts, issues, and trends in grid technology"--Provided by publisher.

This research aims at designing and building a scheduling framework for distributed computing systems with the primary objectives of providing fast response times to the users, delivering high system throughout and accommodating maximum number of applications into the systems. The author claims that the above mentioned objectives are the most important objectives for scheduling in recent distributed computing systems, especially Grid computing environments. In order to achieve the objectives of the scheduling framework, the scheduler employs arbitration of application-level schedules and preemption of executing jobs under certain conditions. In application-level scheduling, the user develops a schedule for his application using an execution model that simulates the execution behavior of the application. Since application-level scheduling can seriously impede the performance of the system, the scheduling framework developed in this research arbitrates between different application-level schedules corresponding to different applications to provide fair system usage for all applications and balance the interests of different applications. In this sense, the scheduling framework is not a classical scheduling system, but a meta-scheduling system that interacts with the application-level schedulers. Due to the large system dynamics involved in Grid computing systems, the ability to preempt executing jobs becomes a necessity. The meta-scheduler described in this dissertation employs well defined scheduling policies to preempt and migrate executing applications. In order to provide the users with the capability to make their applications preemptible, a user-level checkpointing library called SRS (Stop-Restart Software) was also developed by this research. The SRS library is different from many user-level checkpointing libraries since it allows reconfiguration of applications between migrations. This reconfiguration can be achieved by changing the processor configuration and/or data distribution. The experimental results provided in this dissertation demonstrates the utility of the metascheduling framework for distributed computing systems. And lastly, the metascheduling framework was put to practical use by building a Grid computing system called GradSolve. GradSolve is a flexible system and it allows the application library writers to upload applications with different capabilities into the system. GradSolve is also unique with respect to maintaining traces of the execution of the applications and using the traces for subsequent executions of the application.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2012, held in Berlin, Germany, in November 2012. The 12 revised full papers presented together with 6 work in progress papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 36 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: market mechanisms, pricing and negotiation; resource allocation, scheduling and admission control; work in progress on tools and techniques for cost-efficient service selection; market modeling; trust; cloud computing in education; and work in progress on cloud adoption and business models.

This book presents the latest research on the software crowdsourcing approach to develop large and complex software in a cloud-based platform. It develops the fundamental principles, management organization and processes, and a cloud-based infrastructure to support this new software development approach. The book examines a variety of issues in software crowdsourcing processes, including software quality, costs, diversity of solutions, and the competitive nature of crowdsourcing processes. Furthermore, the book outlines a research roadmap of this emerging field, including all the key technology and management issues for the foreseeable future. Crowdsourcing, as demonstrated by Wikipedia and Facebook for online web applications, has shown promising results for a variety of applications, including healthcare, business, gold mining exploration, education, and software development. Software crowdsourcing is emerging as a promising solution to designing, developing and maintaining software. Preliminary software crowdsourcing practices and platforms, including Apple's App Store and TopCoder, demonstrate the advantages of crowdsourcing in terms of software ecosystem expansion and product quality improvement.