Carl A. Waldspurger, Tad Hogg, Bernardo A. Huberman, Jeffery O. Kephart and W. Scott Stornetta
Dynamics of Computation Group
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Palo Alto, CA 94304
hogg@parc.xerox.com
@ARTICLE {
AUTHOR = "Carl A. Waldspurger and Tad Hogg and Bernardo A. Huberman and Jeffery O. Kephart and W. Scott Stornetta",
TITLE = "Spawn: A Distributed Computational Economy",
JOURNAL = "IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering",
VOLUME = "18",
NUMBER = "2",
PAGES = "103-117",
MONTH = "February",
YEAR = "1992"}
We have designed and implemented an open, market-based computational
system called Spawn. The Spawn system utilizes idle computational
resources in a distributed network of heterogeneous computer
workstations. It supports both coarse-grain concurrent applications
and the remote execution of many independent tasks. Using concurrent
Monte-Carlo simulations as prototypical applications, we explore
issues of fairness in resource distribution, currency as a form of
priority, price equilibria, the dynamics of transients, and scaling to
large systems. In addition to serving the practical goal of
harnessing idle processor time in a computer network, Spawn has
proven to be a valuable experimental workbench for studying
computational markets and their dynamics.
Index Terms: Concurrent systems, distributed systems,
dynamic load sharing, microeconomic algorithms, priority mechanisms,
resource allocation, scheduling.
postcript (596K, available on-line only within Xerox)