Trading Grid Services within the UK E-Science Grid

Abstract

The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) presents the Grid community with an opportunity to define standard service interfaces to enable the construction of an interoperable Grid infrastructure. The provision of this infrastructure has, to date, come from the donation of time and effort from the research community primarily for their own use. The growing involvement of industry and commerce in Grid activity is accelerating the need to find business models that support their participation. It is therefore essential that an economic infrastructure be incorporated into the OGSA to support economic transactions between service providers and their clients. This chapter describes current standardization efforts taking place with the Global Grid Forum and the implementation of such an architecture within the UK e-Science Programme through the Computational Markets project.