Pricing for Utility-Driven Resource Management and Allocation in Clusters

Users perceive varying levels of utility for each different job completed by the cluster. Therefore, there is a need for existing cluster Resource Management Systems (RMS) to provide a means for the user to express its perceived utility during job submission. The cluster RMS can then obtain and consider these user-centric needs such as Quality-Of-Service requirements in order to achieve utility-driven resource management and allocation. We advocate the use of computational economy for this purpose. In this paper, we describe an architectural framework for a utility-driven cluster RMS. We present a user-level job submission specification for soliciting user-centric information that is used by the cluster RMS for making better resource allocation decisions. In addition, we propose a dynamic pricing function that the cluster owner can use to determine the level of sharing within a cluster. Finally, we define two user-centric performance evaluation metrics: Job QoS Satisfaction and Cluster Profitability for measuring the effectiveness of the proposed pricing function in realizing utility-driven resource management and allocation.