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The commercial exploitation of distributed computing technologies is slowly starting to become popular under the general area of cloud computing. These solutions allow selling and buying of resources (i.e., computing, network, software, and data resources) on demand. Existing solutions in this area are diverse, ranging from Infrastructure-- a-Service (IaaS) models via Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models. Although the economics of these services is not yet fully understood and the interoperability between such services is still lacking, a common market for computing services is slowly developing. Such a market would allow buyers and sellers of computing services to trade their excess capacity or make available their capacity at a cost. However, it is still not p- sible for a market participant to act as a resource provider or seller, or trade based on the current level of demand. Another example of a developing open market is the emergence of Web2.0-based services. These enable consumers to create new services by aggregating services from multiple providers. The benefit of these solutions is that “value” can be created by combining services at different prices.

GECON - Grid Economics and Business Models Cloud computing is seen by many people as the natural evolution of Grid computing concepts. Both, for instance, rely on the use of service-based approaches for pro- sioning compute and data resources. The importance of understanding business m- els and the economics of distributed computing systems and services has generally remained unchanged in the move to Cloud computing. This understanding is nec- sary in order to build sustainable e-infrastructure and businesses around this paradigm of sharing Cloud services. Currently, only a handful of companies have created s- cessful businesses around Cloud services. Among these, Amazon and Salesforce (with their offerings of Elastic Compute Cloud and force. com among other offerings) are the most prominent. Both companies understand how to charge for their services and how to enable commercial transactions on them. However, whether a wide-spread adoption of Cloud services will occur has to seen. One key enabler remains the ability to support suitable business models and charging schemes that appeal to users o- sourcing (part of) their internal business functions. The topics that have been addressed by the authors of accepted papers reflect the above-described situation and the need for a better understanding of Grid economics. The topics range from market mechanisms for trading computing resources, capacity planning, tools for modeling economic aspects of service-oriented systems, archit- tures for handling service level agreements, to models for economically efficient resource allocation.

Grid Computing requires the use of software that can divide and farm out pieces of a program to as many as several thousand computers. This book explores processes and techniques needed to create a successful Grid infrastructure. Leading researchers in Europe and the US look at the development of specialist tools and environments which will encourage the convergence of the parallel programming, distributed computing and data management communities. Specific topics covered include: An overview of structural and behavioural properties of Computer Grid applications Discussion of alternative programming techniques Case studies displaying the potential of Computer Grids in solving real problems This book is unique in its outline of the needs of Computational Grids both in integration of high-end resources using OGSA/Globus, and the loose integration of Peer-2-Peer/Entropia/United Devices. Readers will gain an insight on the limitations of existing approaches as well as the standardisation activities currently taking place.

Parallel and distributed computing in the 1980s and 1990s had great in?uence onapplication developmentin science, engineering andbusiness computing. The improvements in computation and communication capabilities have enabled the creation of demanding applications in critical domains such as the environment, health, aerospace, and other areas of science and technology. Similarly, new classesofapplicationsareenabledbytheavailabilityofheterogeneouslarge-scale distributed systems which are becoming available nowadays (based on techno- giessuchasgridandpeer-to-peersystems).Parallelcomputingsystemsexploita large diversity of computer architectures, from supercomputers, shared-memory or distributed-memory multi processors, to local networks and clusters of p- sonal computers. With the recent emergence of multi core architectures, parallel computing is now set to achieve “mainstream” status. Approaches that have been advocated by parallelcomputing researchersin the past are now being utilized in a number of software libraries and hardware systems that are available for everyday use. Parallel computing ideas have also come to dominate areas such as multi user gaming (especially in the development of gaming engines based on “cell” arc- tectures) – often ignored by many “serious” researchers in the past, but which now are set to have a growing user base of tens of millions across the world. In recent years, focus has also shifted to support energy e?ciency in com- tation, with some researchers proposing a new metric of performance based on Flops/Watt.

'Welcome to the proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC 2005) which was held in Sorrento (Naples), Italy, September 21-23, 2005.'

As information handling systems get more and more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage them using traditional approaches based on centralized and pre-defined control mechanisms. Over recent years, there has been a significant increase in taking inspiration from biology, the physical world, chemistry, and social systems to more efficiently manage such systems - generally based on the concept of self-organisation; this gave rise to self-organising applications. This book constitutes a reference and starting point for establishing the field of engineering self-organising applications. It comprises revised and extended papers presented at the Engineering Self-Organising Applications Workshop, ESOA 2003, held at AAMAS 2003 in Melbourne, Australia, in July 2003 and selected invited papers from leading researchers in self-organisation. The book is organized in parts on applications, natural metaphors (multi-cells and genetic algorithms, stigmergy, and atoms and evolution), artificial interaction mechanisms, middleware, and methods and tools.

Building research grade multi-agent systems usually involves a broad variety of software infrastructure ingredients like planning, scheduling, coordination, communication, transport, simulation, and module integration technologies and as such constitutes a great challenge to the individual researcher active in the area.The book presents a collection of papers on approaches that will help make deployed and large scale multi-agent systems a reality. The first part focuses on available infrastructure and requirements for constructing research-grade agents and multi-agent systems. The second part deals with support in infrastructure and software development methods for multi-agent systems that can directly support coordination and management of large multi-agent communities; performance analysis and scalability techniques are needed to promote deployment of multi-agent systems to professionals in software engineering and information technology.