Gecon2009

The commercial exploitation of Grid computing is slowly starting to become popular under the term "Cloud Computing". These existing solutions are very diverse, ranging from Resource-as-a-Service (RaaS) models to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models. However, the existing cloud offerings can only be purchased directly from a provider; they cannot be traded in a common market. Such a cloud market would act as a focal point for Grid buyers and sellers to meet. In fact, in an open market, any market participant could act as a resource provider or resource seller, depending on the current demand level. This approach would allow companies to benefit: on the one hand, excess capacity can be sold to reduce costs; on the other hand, demand peaks can be covered with cheap Grid resources.

This type of Grid market could be used to sell a wide array of resources, ranging from simple resource services (network, storage, computing) for mass usage, to complex services encapsulating e-Science or high-performance-computing (HPC) methods. At later stages, the market could be easily expanded to include software and information services. This would allow the buyer to not only purchase resources, but also to add software and information services to create new and innovative end-user services.

The GECON workshop invites researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss issues associated with the development of a common market for computing resources, including networks, storage, and software. The purpose of this workshop is to suggest future directions of research and extensions to existing technologies, aiming at the successful deployment of this commercial, service-oriented market for computing resources.

Researchers and practitioners are invited to present final results and work in progress. However, submissions have to be original research in the area of Grid economics. The topics of interest are:

• Business modeling and analysis
• Grid value chain and value networks
• Economic modeling of networks, systems, and software
• Software-as-a-Service models
• Web2.0
• Peer-to-Peer systems
• Markets, market mechanisms and market models
• Service-orientation of Grid systems
• Utility computing models for networked systems
• Knowledge utility models
• Incentives for participation and resource sharing
• Economic-enhanced Grid services
• Analysis of pricing schemes for Grid systems
• Reports on test beds and operation
• Analysis of application scenarios (with stakeholders and roles)
• Resource (computing, bandwidth, storage) selection and allocation
• Metering, accounting, and charging
• Billing systems
• Decision support systems for users and providers
• Capacity planning systems
• Service level agreements (SLAs)
• Economic aspects of XaaS Virtual organizations
• Trust, security, and risk management
• Standardization
• Virtual organizations
• Impact of legal requirements on distributed computing
• Economics-aware operation of applications
• Economics of software
• Infrastructure development

This workshop follows the very successful past conferences, where high-quality technical papers have been presented.

The workshop will be held in conjunction with Euro-Par 2009.
All papers will be published in the workshop proceedings as Springer LNCS .