The emergence of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) which builds upon commercial Web Services infrastructures, opens up the possibility that the future Grid will be realised as a set of independently sourced services. Such services could then be separately acquired, composed and used. However the realisation of a proper commercial market in Grid Services requires the development and implementation of mechanisms for negotiating the cost and terms of a contract to use a Grid Service, monitoring and logging the use of such a service and secure and trusted methods for billing and payment. Indeed it could be argued that the development of such a trading infrastructure is necessary if Grid applications are ever to progress from collaborations between organisations with some pre-arranged contract (e.g. software licence or prior agreement to share resources) to an open and flexible market in Grid resources.
This project, funded by the DTI under the e-Science Core Technology programme, is led by the London e-Science Centre and involves a wide range of e-Science institutions and commercial organisations with interests and expertise in Grid resource provision and use. It will design and implement mechanisms to support the trading of Grid resources for all modalities of service (software, data, execution environments, network capacity etc.) and explore the brokering and market mechanisms that will be enabled by such an infrastructure. This project will produce professional accounting, charging and payment mechanisms and software for the UK e-Science Grid and provide UK input into OGSA, its open source reference implementation, the Globus Toolkit 3.0 (GT3), and the Global Grid Forum (GGF), through the use of emerging Grid Service technologies.

The project has four major phases.
A series of Use Cases will be developed by the commercial partners and e-Science capability providers to establish the market opportunities and requirements in each area. Having defined the functionality and behaviour of the core services and protocols required these will be documented to serve as input to the standardisation process through the GGF and other relevant bodies.
Following this requirements analysis the necessary mechanisms will be specified as extensions to the core OGSA compatible services. The specification of these interfaces will provide input into the GGF and other standardisation bodies. A reference implementation of these extensions will be produced and contributed to the Globus GT3 OGSA platform.
Once the basic trading infrastructure is in place its practicality will be tested via a series of trial deployments in three areas:

• The Computer Sciences Corporation will carry out a series of trial deployments within their client HPC installations.
• The UK e-Science Grid will be used to test the core functionality and the feasibility of the trading mechanisms proposed.
• The Astrophysics Research Institute at Liverpool John Moores University will implement the market services within the eStar e-Science demonstrator and deploy them to overseas telescope sites run by UK organisations.