A pricing information service for grid computing

This paper addresses two shortcomings that exist in the area of pricing Grid services in an economic Grid environment. The first shortcoming is that there are no standards for pricing schemes, caused by a large difference in the units that are traded (e.g. CPU cycles or virtual clusters) in Grid computing. The second shortcoming is the lack of a model for managing the pricing of informational elements (e.g. software applications) and computational elements (e.g. virtual machines, which comprise resources such as CPU, memory, disk space, network bandwidth). This paper presents a pricing service for Grid computing services, which resolves the shortcomings by introducing a general pricing scheme for informational and computational elements. We describe the functional requirements, architecture, and the interfaces of the pricing service. The pricing service allows expressing the proposed general pricing scheme as an XML document, which can be linked to service level agreements. Contrary to other proposals on pricing, the pricing service is separated from the functionality of metering, accounting, and payment. To validate the concept of a pricing information service, we portray two Utility Computing scenarios.