A Marketplace and its Market Mechanism for Trading Commoditized Computing Resources

This paper presents the design and implementation of the GridEcon Marketplace. In addition to supporting a market mechanism for trading computing resources on a pay-per-use basis, this marketplace also provides an environment for integrating value-added support services. These value-added services help consumers to use the utility computing market more efficiently. The GridEcon Market Mechanism for virtual machines specifies in detail the unit-of-trade, the bids and asks, as well as the matching algorithm. The marketplace and market mechanism are validated by using the GridEcon Platform, which is a service-oriented platform for composing market scenarios. Our validation results show that the GridEcon Marketplace fulfills all functional requirements and that the GridEcon Market Mechanism is computationally and economically efficient.