The POPCORN Market – an Online Market for Computational Resources?

The POPCORN project provides an infrastructure for globally distributed computation over the whole Internet. It provides any programmer connected to the Internet with a single huge virtual parallel computer composed of all processors on the Internet, which care to participate at any given moment. POPCORN provides a marketbased mechanism for trade in CPU time to motivate processors to provide their CPU cycles for other peoples’ computations. “Selling” CPU time is as easy as visiting a certain web site with a Java-enabled browser. “Buying” CPU time is done by writing a parallel program using the POPCORN paradigm. A third entity in the POPCORN system is a “market” for CPU time, which is where buyers and sellers meet and trade. The POPCORN system may be visited on our website: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~popcorn. This paper concentrates on the POPCORN market. The market is a trusted intermediary that is responsible for matching buyers and sellers according to economic criteria. Our design emphasizes minimal communication requirements and minimal strategic considerations on the part of both buyers and sellers. We implemented several market mechanisms of the single-sided and double-sided auction types. We analyze the economic efficiency of these mechanisms using analytical and simulation methods. Our findings support the use of these mechanisms in the Internet environment.