Grid Economics: 10 Lessons from Finance

Today Grid technology is finding its way out of the academic incubator and into commercial environments. The interest in on-demand utility computing is larger then ever before in the industry and Grid tools are seen as an important enabler of this business model. The process of Grid commercialization inevitably brings financial issues to the fore. When multiple budget entities share resources, allocation decisions in resource management become also financial decisions. For the potentially large and complex systems enabled by Grids, equivalently robust financial engineering is needed. We draw parallels to the financial and commodity markets and outline 10 lessons learnt in the long history of asset management and decision-support for these markets. We show the relevance of these lessons for Grid commercialization and suggest specific issues that need to be resolved before (virtual) organizations can realize the theoretical value of Grid computing