A Grid Resources Pricing Model based on Financial Options Concept

Summary form only given. Grid computing has developed extensively in recent years for executing computationally resource-intensive applications. Pricing grid resources have become an important problem and few economic models suggest tools for pricing the resources. In this talk, we review some of the economic models and introduce concepts from finance and the similarities between grid resources market and one of the financial markets - options market. We first highlight the importance of finance models over economic models for the given problem and explain how option theory fits well to price the grid resources. We design and develop a quality of service (QoS)-profit equilibrium model for pricing grid resources that is based on finance concepts. With the objective of striking and maintaining equilibrium between service satisfaction and profitability for using grid resources, we evaluate our proposed model using the data from the above real grids. Various grid resources such as memory, storage, software, and compute cycles are seen as individual commodities and pricing of the resources is done in isolation and in combination of various resources. With large number of experiments carried out, a justification of the pricing model is provided by comparing real behavior to a simulated system based on the spot price for the grid resources.