Gecon2008

Although many companies and academic institutions have already developed Grid infrastructures, a global commercial Grid has not been created yet. The missing component for such a commercial Grid is a market, which allows trading of goods such as data, software, processing power, storage, and bandwidth. This market for Grid services would not only be the first step towards a global commercial Grid but would also turn the Grid into an environment where all users (i.e. the general public, academic institutions, SMEs, and large companies) can access Grid services in the same way. These Grid services are expected to range from simple services for mass usage, to complex services encapsulating e-Science or high-performance-computing (HPC) methods.

The purpose of this workshop is also to suggest future directions of research and amendments to existing technologies, aiming at the successful deployment of a global, commercial service-oriented Grid system. In addition to this, the workshop will feature an industry session in order to increase the knowledge transfer between academia and industry. Speakers of major utility computing providers are expected, describing the state-of-the-art of the commercial Grid and the customer acceptance of the shift from “buying computing resources” to “computing on demand”.
The workshop will also provide a forum for projects on Grid economics to present themselves. As for the very successful workshop GECON 2007, also this year's proceedings will be published as a Springer LNCS volume.

This workshop invites researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to present current results and original research in the area of Grid economics.The workshop will focus on the interdisciplinary research in the area of IT infrastructure and economics. In particular, the topics of interest are (but not limited to):

• Analysis of existing Grid middleware technology
• Business modeling
• Grid value chain and value networks
• Software-as-a-Service models
• Markets and market mechanisms for the Grid
• Service-orientation of Grid systems
• Utility computing models
• Knowledge utility models
• Incentives for participation and resource sharing
• Economic-enhanced Grid services
• Analysis of pricing schemes for Grid systems
• Reports on Grid test beds and operation
• Analysis of application scenarios (with stakeholders and roles)
• Resource (computing, bandwidth, storage) selection and allocation
• Metering, accounting, charging, billing systems
• Models for service-oriented computing
• Decision support systems for Grid users and providers
• Capacity planning systems
• Service level agreements (SLAs)
• Market models for the grid Virtual organizations
• Economic aspects of existing Grid applications
• Reports on national and international projects on Grid
• Trust, security, and risk management
• Standardization
• Virtual organizations
• Impact of legal requirements on Grid operation
• Middleware support for real-time online interactive applications
• Economics-aware operation of Grid applications

This workshop follows the very successful 4th workshop in Rennes last year, where more than 50 people participated and 12 high-quality technical papers had been presented. The acceptance rate has been below 40 percent. As a consequence of the high demand for this workshop, the workshop has been extended to a 2-days workshop.

The workshop will be held in conjunction with Euro-Par 2008.
All papers will be published in the workshop proceedings as Springer LNCS .