A novel application of option pricing to distributed resources management

In this paper, we address a novel application of financial option pricing theory to the management of distributed computing resources. To achieve the set objective, first, we highlight the importance of finance models for the given problem and explain how option theory fits well to price the distributed grid compute resources. Second, we design and develop a pricing model and generate pricing results based on the trace data drawn from two real grids: one commercial grid Auvergrid and one experimental platform grid LCG. We evaluate our proposed model using various grid compute resources (such as memory, storage, software, and compute cycles) as individual commodities. By carrying out several experiments, a justification of the pricing model is obtained by comparing real behavior to a simulated system based on the spot price for the resources. We further enhanced our model to achieve a desirable balance between Quality of Service (QoS) and profitability from the perspectives of the users and resource operators respectively.