Introducing risk management into the grid

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are explicit statements about all expectations and obligations in the business partnership between customers and providers. They have been introduced in Grid computing to overcome the best effort approach, making the Grid more interesting for commercial applications. However, decisions on negotiation and system management still rely on static approaches, not reflecting the risk linked with decisions. The EC-funded project "AssessGrid" aims at introducing risk assessment and management as a novel decision paradigm into Grid computing. This paper gives a general motivation for risk management and presents the envisaged architecture of a "risk-aware" Grid middleware and Grid fabric, highlighting its functionality by means of three showcase scenarios.