Peer Hasselmeyer, Changtao Qu, Lutz Schubert, Bastian Koller, Philipp Wieder,"Towards Autonomous Brokered SLA Negotiations", Exploiting the Knowledge Economy: Issues, Applications, Case Studies (eChallenges 2006), Barcelona, Spain, October 2006.
Today the whole contract lifecycle in eBusiness is handled manually. Contracts are not only written and agreed upon by humans, they have to be manually translated into technical terms to become an electronic contract. More and more research activities in eBusiness focus on the usage of electronic contracts (in particular Service Level Agreements) and how they can be created and enforced autonomously. So far, proposed solutions were not taken up by business users because of low flexibility, poor usability and high maintenance costs. This paper presents a proposal how “traditional” approaches can be extended to a broker-based solution valuable to business users, in particular small and medium-sized enterprises. The focus is on one of the main phases in the SLA-lifecycle – the negotiation phase. The paper describes how SLA negotiation can be outsourced to third parties and what the benefits and difficulties of such an approach would be.
Peer Hasselmeyer, Bastian Koller, Lutz Schubert,Philipp Wieder,"Towards SLA-supported Resource Management", Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC2006), published by Springer Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Achievements and experiences in projects with focus on resource management have shown that the goals and needs of High Performance Computing service providers have not or only inadequately been taken into account in Grid research and development. Mapping real-life business behaviour and workflows within the service provider domain to the electronic level implies focusing on the business rules of the provider as well as on the complexity of the jobs and the current state of the HPC system. This paper describes an architectural approach towards a business-oriented and Service Level Agreement-supported resource management, valuable for High Performance Computing providers to offer and sell their services. With the introduction of a Conversion Factory the authors present a component that is able to combine the Service Level Agreement, the system status, and all business objectives of the provider in order to address the business needs of service providers in the Grid.
