Grid resources pricing: A novel financial option based quality of service-profit quasi-static equilibrium model

Use of grid resources has been free so far and a trend is developing to charge the users. The challenges that characterize a grid resource pricing model include the dynamic ability of the model to provide a high satisfaction guarantee measured as quality of service (QoS) - from users perspectives, profitability constraints - from the grid operator perspectives, and the ability to orchestrate grid resources for their availability on-demand. In this study, we design, develop, and simulate a grid resources pricing model that balances these constraints. We employ financial option theory and treat the grid resources as real assets to capture the realistic value of the grid compute commodities. We then price the grid resources by solving the finance model. We discuss the results on pricing of compute cycles based on the actual data of grid usage pattern obtained from the WestGrid and the SHARCNET. We extend and generalize our study to any computational grid.