Advances in service-oriented architectures (SOA), virtualization, high-speed networks, and cloud computing has resulted in attractive pay-as-you-go services. Job scheduling on these systems results in commodity bidding for computing time. This bidding is institutionalized by Amazon for its Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) environment and bidding methods exist for other cloud-computing vendors as well as multi-cloud and cluster computing brokers such as SpotCloud. Commodity bidding for computing has resulted in complex spot price models that have ad-hoc strategies to provide demand for excess capacity. In this paper we will discuss vendors who provide spot pricing and bidding and present a predictive model for future spot prices based on neural networking giving users a high confidence on future prices aiding bidding on commodity computing.

In order to achieve a reasonable degree of performance and reliability, Metascheduling has been revealed as a key functionality of the grid middleware. The aim of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis between two major grid scheduling philo