Resource Pricing In A Dynamic Multi-Commodity Market For Computational Resources

The adoption of market-based principles in resource management systems for computational infrastructures such as grids and clusters allows for matching demand and supply for resources in a utility maximizing manner. As such, they offer a promise of producing more efficient resource allocations, compared to traditional system-centric approaches that do not allow consumers and providers to express their valuations for computational resources. In this paper, we investigate the pricing of resources in grids through the use of a computational commodity market of CPU resources, where resource prices are determined through the computation of a supply-and-demand equilibrium. In particular, we introduce several categories of CPUs characterized by their execution speed. These differ in cost and performance but may be used interchangeably in executing jobs and thus represent so-called substitutable resources. We investigate the performance of the algorithms for computing the supply-and-demand equilibrium in this multi-commodity setting under dynamically varying consumer and provider populations.