Trading Grid Services Within the UK e-Science Grid

The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) presents the Grid community with an opportunity to define standard interfaces to enable the construction of an interoperable Grid infrastructure. The provision of this infrastructure has to date come from the donation of time and effort from the research community primarily for their own use. The growing involvement of industry and commerce in Grid activity is accelerating the need to find business models that support their particpation. It is therefore essential that an economic infrastructure be incorporated into the OGSA to support economic transactions between service providers and their clients. Within this paper we describe the current status of the ‘Market for Computational Serivces’ project funded by the UK e-Science Core Programme and the efforts taking place with the Global Grid Forum to build global interoperable standards in this area.