The POPCORN market. Online markets for computational resources

摘要

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 market-based 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 web-site: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/∼popcorn.