GridEcon has developed a marketplace for the grid. Image courtesy Neil Gould, stock.xchng

Ever since grid computing was conceived, there have been visions of one colossal standard grid which is open and simple for anyone to use, just as you can plug into an electrical power grid to get as much electricity as you need on demand.

The dream of making grid computing a universal on-demand utility has yet to be realized. But what if instead of being like a power grid, grid computing resources were available through an open market?

The GridEcon project has developed a platform which turns grid computing resources into commodities which can be bought and sold like stock.

Because the ideology behind grids when they were first established was to enable computing resources to be shared for free, a market system for sharing computer resources seems to go against this ethic. However, the rising popularity of clouds — once described as “grids with a business model” — and the increasingly blurred boundaries between the two technologies means that a “grid stock market” could be a viable and effective way to share resources.

GridEcon has created a virtual trading floor that allows users to both buy and sell computer resources. This means that they can buy capacity (using “bids”) when they need it and sell capacity (using “asks”) when they have spare resources. The GridEcon system matches up compatible asks and bids in order to allocate resources using an algorithm described by the quantity of resource units, required/available time for a resource, price and expiration dates.

In the process of building GridEcon, the developers have produced an extensive range of publications which they have compiled into a book which can be downloaded for free.

If you want to see what using the GridEcon marketplace for is like for yourself, click here to try the demo.

—Seth Bell, iSGTW.

Want to put in your two bits? Then go to our thread on the iSGTW forum on Nature Networks.