TRLabs Online Computation Market

June 04, 2005 -- A novel online auctioning model that allows businesses and organizations to buy and sell computing and network resources.

Advantages:

  • Capable of aggregating resources based on attributes and network proximity
  • Allows resources to be sold individually or as a unit
  • Provides buyers with more choices and is suitable for a wide variety of applications

In today’s marketplace rapid advancements are being made in microprocessor and networking technologies. These advancements, when coupled with the emergence of new classes of applications with significantly increased resource requirements, tend to rapidly depreciate the value of state-of-the-art computing and networking equipment. Consequently, it is becoming increasingly important to maximize the utilization of computing resources so that users can maximize their return on investment.

One potential solution to this problem is for users to distribute computing resources. The incredible growth of the Internet coupled with the rapidly advancing computing capabilities and processing capacity of today’s computers has created a massive interconnection of highly capable, yet largely underused, computing resources. This is further accentuated by the fact that “busy” hours in one region tend to be “idle” hours in another. Clearly, it would prove beneficial if these under-utilized resources could be distributed and traded through the network.

One potential means of distributing computing resources over the network is to establish an online computation market. A computation market is an online auctioning system for exchanging computing and networking resources. However, while currently there exist online auctioning systems -- eBay, yahoo, online.com, and amazon.com -- there are no online auctioning systems that support on-demand acquisition of computing and network resources for temporary use.

To this end, TRLabs’ researchers have developed an online computation market that provides a flexible, efficient means of sharing computing resources. TRLabs Computation Market (CM) provides resource owners with a facility to sell unused capacity and resource consumers a facility to buy resources on a “when and where needed” basis. The Computation Market also allows the resource consumers to reduce their initial investment on resources and allows resources to be upgraded in an incremental fashion.

Novel features of TRLabs’ Computation Market include its capability to aggregate resources based on their attributes and network proximity, and the ability to sell these resources as a unit or individually. Further, the system is scalable and involves low communication overhead. These features provide buyers with more choices and make the Computation Market approach suitable for a wider variety of applications.

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