Utilizing "Opaque" Resources for Revenue Enhancement on Clouds and Grids

Clouds and grids are distributed resource infrastructures that are subjected to both On Demand (OD) as well as Advance reservation (AR) requests. This paper focuses on the revenue that can be earned on cloud and grid systems using different matchmaking strategies that map requests to resources. Existing research on matchmaking uses a priori knowledge of the local scheduling policy used at the resources. However, in these dynamic and heterogeneous systems having detailed a priori knowledge about all the resources is not always feasible. Thus, traditional matchmaking strategies cannot use the resources for which the local scheduling policies are unknown. This paper discusses how a novel matchmaking strategy that does not use knowledge of the local scheduling policies used at the resources may be deployed in order to utilize these un-used resources and improve the revenue earned by the service providing enterprise. Based on analytic bounds and simulation, insights gained into system behaviour and revenue earned are presented.