A New Grid Market Architecture Based on Contract-Management and Third-Party Depository Service

In recent years, the research to the Grid economy has become a hot spot with the development of Grid technology. Some models and middleware have been proposed to improve the application of Grid economy. One remarkable result of these is the Grid Architecture for Computational Economy (GRACE) which contains the functionality of resource discovery, resource trade and resource allocation. However, in the model, once the trade is set up in GRACE, there is no way to monitor whether the seller (i.e., resource owner) has provided the services or the buyer (i.e., user) has accepted the services according to their commitment. Some models introduce the reputation evaluation system, but these methods can only affect the future reputation of buyers and sellers as well as the subsequent course of trading, without any binding effect on the ongoing transaction. In the open Grid environment, it's necessary to establish a mechanism of regulating and restricting all of trading activities and participants. Thus a new Grid Market Architecture Based on Contract-management and Third-party Depository Service (GMACD) is proposed in this paper. Here Grid is regarded as a market where each user can be a resource seller as well as a resource buyer as needed. Contract-management mechanism is led into Grid Market (GM) and the Contract Manager (CM) acts as the kernel module of GMACD. As an important part of GMACD, GRACE is still in charge of resource discovery, trade and allocation. The whole process of market transactions is constrained by CM. The Third-party Depository Service is used in order to manage the flow of the contract amount. The components and the workflow of GMACD are discussed in detail in this paper. The simulation experiments reveal the significance of our proposed new architecture.