Tycoon: an Implemention of a Distributed Market-Based Resource Allocation System

Distributed clusters like the Grid and PlanetLab enable the same statistical multiplexing e±ciency gains for computing as the Internet provides for networking. One major challenge is allocating resources in an economically e±cient and low-latency way. A common solution is proportional share, where users each get resources in proportion to their pre-de¯ned weight. However, this does not allow users to di®erentiate the value of their jobs. This leads to economic ine±ciency. In contrast, systems that require reservations impose a high latency (typically minutes to hours) to acquire resources. Tycoon, a market based distributed resource allocation system based on proportional share, is pre-sented. The key advantages of Tycoon are that it allows users to di®erentiate the value of their jobs, its resource acquisition latency is limited only by communication delays, and it imposes no manual bidding overhead on users. Experimental results using a prototype implementation of the design are presented.