The past 2 weeks

Since this blog is only an hour old, and I've already been researching some topics in the past 2 weeks, I believe that giving an overview of what I've done until now is a good starting point.

An important starting point for the thesis was researching the energy trading market and evaluating the differences an parallels with the IaaS market. In this respect, I read the 5 first chapters of Fundamentals of Power System Economics [1].
These chapters give a good overview of how energy trading markets function, and on which principles they are based. They also cover some basic concepts from (micro-)economics. Although was already familiar with many of the explained topics (about micro-economics), I believe that it is good that those were repeated as I'll come accros the same concepts throughout my further research. I uploaded an overview of the contents of the first 5 chapters to give you an idea of the covered topics.
I did not read chapters 6-8 because these chapters focus more on the technical aspect of trading electrical power. In order to fully understand these chapters, a broader electrical engineering background is required. Futhermore, reading these chapters provides little added value to the research I'm doing.

Besides reading in [1], I also read some papers about the GridEcon project that has been developed as part of the European Community funded "Sixth Framework Programme".

GridEcon 1.0 is a computational resource auctioning system built upon an innovative bid matching algorithm tailored specifically for the trading of computing power.  It brings together both consumers and providers of available computational resources and not only has the capability to deliver those resources just like Amazon, IBM and Microsoft, but also allows you to trade your own excess computational power... all in a single, cost-effective marketplace.

More specifically, I read the papers

• Market Mechanisms for Trading Grid Resources [2]
• A MarketPlace and its Market Mechanisms for Trading Commoditized Computing Resources [3]
• GridEcon: A Market place for Computing Resources [4]

Additionally, I had a quick look at the online demo and the available source code . More about the GridEcon project in a future blog post.

I also started reading in the PhD thesis of Nicolas Dube [5], which seems to contain some interesting concepts concerning resource specification for markets. I also be writing a seperate blogpost to discuss some of the ideas of Dube's thesis.

On Wed 06/10/10, I had a first meeting with my Promoter Kurt Vanmechelen, with who I discussed the work I already did.
We also determined a preliminary outline for my thesis.

H1 Introduction
- What is cloud computing?
- Explain analogy with power systems
- Short comparison of power systems with clouds (level of market structure + goods)
- Research questions
H2 Market Design Principles
- Why a market?
- What are the advantages of introducing it?
- What are the difficulties introducing it?
- What properties should a market ideally have ?
    - Allocative efficiency
    - Individual Rationality
    - Incentive Incompatibility (is there an incentive to game the system or are bidders inclined to bid their true costs/valuations)
    - Computational Tractability
- Of what components does a market exist?
    -> Bidding language
    -> Clearing / allocation rule
    -> Pricing rule
- Scoping (what features will (not) be modelled by the market's bidding language)
H3 Cloud Exchange Market Design
- Description of market components
- Architectural diagram of market design
    -> Execute transactions
    -> Software component design + deployment (Web service technology)
H4 Evaluation / Simulation
- Assess a number of market properties
    -> Does the market behave as expected (i.e. price reaction to demand/supply changes)
- Evaluate scalability / computational tractability
H5 Future Work
H6 Conclusions

Normally, I'll finish reading Dube's thesis [5] today, and will also add a blogpost about that or about GridEcon.

References

[1] Fundamentals of Power System Economics, Daniel S. Kirschen, Goran Strbac, Wiley 2004
[2] Market Mechanisms for Trading Grid Resources, Costas Courcoubetis, Manos Draminitos, Thierry Rayna, Sergios Soursos and George D. Stamoulis
[3] A MarketPlace and its Market Mechanisms for Trading Commoditized Computing Resources, Jorn Altman, Costas Courcoubetis, Marcel Risch
[4] GridEcon: A Market place for Computing Resources, Jorn Altman, Costas Courcoubetis, George D. Stamoulis, Manos Dramitinos, Thierry Rayna, Marcel Risch, Chris Bannink
[5] SuperComputing Futures: the Next Sharing Paradigm for HPC Resources (Economic Model, Market Analysis and Consequences for the Grid), Nicolas Dube