A Market Model for Resource Allocation in Distributed Operating Systems

This paper describes a model which uses market ideas to allow uniform, scalable allocation of resources by multiple distributed applications in distributed systems. In this situation, using environment unaware manual placement of work by applications will lead to poor load-balancing. Traditionally, such allocation needs to take place in the operating system using heuristics in the presence of incomplete information. We assert that environment aware applications have far better knowledge of the resources they should acquire than any operating system ever could. Using a market model, each process attempts to obtain the speciic resources it requires at market price from a limited supply using restricted funds. Similarly, resource managers attempt to maximise their revenues based on the demands for their services. The connict between these two determines the price and hence a process's preference for each resource. We present a model which utilises market principles, and demonstrate both its exibility and eeectiveness with some preliminary results.