Grid computing along with cloud computing, one of the latest buzzwords in the ICT industry, is enabling the creation of Cyberinfrastructure for e-Science and e-Business applications. Despite a number of advances in Grid computing, utility-oriented resource management and application scheduling in such environments continues to be a challenging and complex undertaking. This is because Grids made up of "autonomous" and geographic distributed (a) resources owned by different organizations with different usage policies, cost models and varying load and availability patterns with time; and (b) users' with varying demands and QoS expectations. To address some these challenges, the Gridbus Project at the University of Melbourne has developed grid middleware technologies that support rapid creation and deployment of eScience and eBusiness applications on market-oriented enterprise and global Grids.

In this seminar, we present technological evolution and key challenges in building and managing Utility Grids. We place emphasis on fundamental challenges of Grid economy, how to design and develop Grid technologies and applications capable of dynamically leasing services of distributed resources at runtime depending on their availability, capability, performance, cost, and users' quality of service requirements. We then introduce Gridbus Project R&D efforts with focus on distributed computational economy for effective management of resources. We briefly present various components of the Gridbus Toolkit and then discuss the Gridbus service broker along with its economic-based scheduling algorithms. Case studies on the use of Gridbus middleware in the creation of various e-Science applications (such as distributed molecular docking and high energy physics) and their deployment on national/international Grids and its impact on emerging Cloud computing paradigm will also be highlighted.