Industry and in particular the manufacturing-oriented sector has always been researched and innovated as a result of technological progress, diversification and differentiation among consumers' demands. A company that provides to its customers products matching perfectly their demands at...

The current access policies and funding schemes of computing e-infrastructures represent a huge challenge for the sustainable growth of computing e-infrastructures and a serious jeopardy for investments made into these e-infrastructures. In order to be able to address these issues, the economics...

Based on the promising developments in Cloud Computing technologies in recent years, commercial computing resource services (e.g. Amazon EC2) or software-as-a-service offerings (e.g. Salesforce.com) came into existence. However, the relatively weak business exploitation, participation, and...

Grid computing evolves toward an open computing environment, which is characterized by highly diversified resource providers and systems. As the control of each computing resource becomes difficult, the security of users¡¯ job is often threatened by various risks occurred at individual...

Due to the few computing resource planning options currently available in Grid computing, capacity planning, an old discipline for analyzing resource purchases, is simple to perform. However, once a commercial computing Grid is established, which provides many different resource types at...

This paper presents the design and implementation of the GridEcon Marketplace. In addition to supporting a market mechanism for trading computing resources on a pay-per-use basis, this marketplace also provides an environment for integrating value-added support services. These value-added...

Volunteer Grids, in which users share computing resources altruistically, play a critical role in fostering research. Sharing and collaboration in Volunteer Grids is determined by many factors. These determinants define the participation in Grids and the amount of contribution to such Grids....

This chapter describes the error recovery mechanisms in the system handling the Grid-based workflow within the Service Level Agreement (SLA) context. It classifies the errors into two main categories. The first is the large-scale errors when one or several Grid sites are detached from the Grid...

Within this paper, we present the GridEcon Platform, a testbed for designing and evaluating economics-aware services in a commercial Cloud computing setting. The Platform is based on the idea that the exact working of such services is difficult to predict in the context of a market and,...

This paper argues that government should pay greater heed to recruitment and retention when designing performance measurement systems for bureaucracies. In the face of pervasive rigidities in public sector pay, internal performance measurement rewards quitters and scars stayers and therefore...