Enabling the simulation of service-oriented computing and provisioning policies for autonomic utility grids

There are key challenges in utility computing environments such as the provisioning, orchestration and allocation of resources to services. In these environments, providers need to decide how resources are allocated to service applications according to their workloads in order to guarantee the Quality of Service (QoS) required by customers. Autonomic computing inspired mechanisms are appealing to enable self-organising resource allocation and provisioning. However, these mechanisms are difficult to evaluate in practice either because of the lack of a real test bed or the difficulty in replicating experimental results. This work thus describes a service framework for a Grid simulator. This framework allows the modelling and evaluation of the provisioning and negotiation of services and resources. We also discuss experimental results that demonstrate the usefulness of this framework for the simulation of a decentralised and self-organising economic model for service and resource negotiation termed Catallaxy.