Quality of Service Negotiation for Commercial Medical Grid Services

The GEMSS project has developed a service-oriented Grid that supports the provision of medical simulation services by service providers to clients such as hospitals. We outline the GEMSS architecture, legal framework and the security features that characterise the GEMSS infrastructure. High levels of quality of service are required and we describe a reservation-based approach to quality of service, employing a quality of service management system that iteratively finds suitable reservations and uses application specific performance models. The GEMSS Grid is a commercial environment so we support flexible pricing models and a FIPA reverse English auction protocol. Signed Web Service Level Agreement contracts are exchanged to commit parties to a quality of service agreement before job execution occurs. We run four experiments across European countries using high performance computing resources running advanced resource reservation schedulers. These experiments provide evidence for our Grid’s rational behaviour, both at the level of service provider quality of service management and at the higher level of the client choosing between competing service providers. The results lend support to our economic model and the technology we use for our medical application domain.