Spawn: a distributed computational economy

Abstract

The authors 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, the authors 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.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>