I. MOTIVATION Recently, we have witnessed that many emerging high performance computing (HPC) or scientific computing applications are developed and hosted in the cloud. As those applications are usually long running jobs and are costly in the cloud, monetary cost [11], [7] and performance [3], [2] are important optimization factors. Message Passing Interface (MPI) is the key programming paradi...

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) leverages an auction approach, called “spot pricing”, to sell cloud resources to users. Spot prices are constantly adjusted by the cloud provider in response to demands, and users’ bids that exceed the spot price are accepted. When a user’s bid falls below the prevailing spot price, the user’s instance is terminated until such a time his bid exceeds the spot...

We propose a model that elucidates the two channels through which alternative marketing arrangements affect spot price in livestock markets. The direct effect works through their effect on demand and supply. The indirect effect works through spot price volatility, which has been ignored in the literature. We then estimate a dynamic model with data from the U.S. hog market to test our model impl...

While the effect speculators have on forward premiums (the difference between forward and expected spot prices) has been widely studied, there has been very little focus on the effect speculators have on competition in the product market. I study the effect speculators have had on production decisions and price levels in New York’s deregulated electricity market. For the Þrst two years of its o...

We consider a stochastic inventory control problem in which a buyer makes procurement decisions while facing periodic random demand and two supply sources, namely, a long-term contract supplier and a spot market. The contract between the buyer and the supplier partially shields the latter from the vicissitudes of the spot market, in that the price paid by the buyer to the supplier is only parti...

We describe Cümülön, a system aimed at helping users develop and deploy matrix-based data analysis programs in a public cloud. A key feature of Cümülön is its end-to-end support for the so-called spot instances—machines whose market price fluctuates over time but is usually much lower than the regular fixed price. A user sets a bid price when acquiring spot instances, and loses them as soon as ...

In this article we develop a model for the commodity price dynamics under the risk-neutral measure where the spot price switches between two distinct stochastic processes depending on whether or not inventory is being held. Specifically, whenever the drift of the spot price exceeds the cost of carrying inventory (interest rate plus storage costs) the inventory is being held. Conversely, wheneve...