Identifying and Modeling the Strengths and Weaknesses of Major Economic Models in Grid Resource Management

Economic-based approaches have been found to be effective for distributed resource management in Grid computing. However, deciding which model to use is challenging, because (1) the performance stability of a particular model in a dynamic and distributed environment, is hard to establish (2) the performance objective of the Grid network may be complex, and it is difficult to know which model would best fit such an objective, (3) evidence indicates that no single model can cope with every scenario, and (4) no suitable tools exist to accurately predict and contrast the performances of one model with another model in a particular domain. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of widely proposed economic models in terms of a range of scenarios is, therefore, crucial. To address this, the authors developed a general evaluation platform suitable for analyzing the performance of different economic models in the Grid. This work identifies domains of strength of individual models and highlights their use in various scenarios of Grid computing.