Gaining users’ trust by publishing failure probabilities

In order to attract users with business-critical jobs to the Grid, they must trust the reliability of the services they request. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have been a first approach to contractually define the Quality of Service (QoS) for a job execution. However, SLAs are not really accepted in the Grid world since resource providers are cautious agreeing them, and users not confident receiving the negotiated QoS. The AssessGrid project offers concepts to help providers gain the users’ trust by publishing the probability of failure of SLAs, leading to an increase of users’ confidence once these probabilities are clearly stated. Users can use this information as a decision factor in the SLA negotiation process. This paper presents the idea of AssessGrid in the scope of increasing trust in the SLA provisioning by integrating risk awareness in the Grid layers. Since only reliable information can create trust, an impartial evaluation of the provider’s trustworthiness is being developed in AssessGrid.