Market-Based Resource Allocation
In 1988 Mark Miller (of E and Xanadu) and K. Eric Drexler (author of Engines of Creation) propsed what they called the 'agoric model' for resource allocation. For instance, each process can bid in auctions in order to purchase CPU time on which to run (or, for that matter, resell). Having recently read several pieces of Singularity-oriented fiction (Accelerando and After Life being the better of them), these concepts seemed particularly on target.
It's already fairly common to 'rent' CPU time and memory (in the form of virtual private servers and remote storage), but right now all companies offering such services only sell large blocks, at more or less fixed rates. My suspicion would be that this gives a larger income per client, but at the cost of utilization. Would it be more profitable to use a fine grained model, renting disk at, say, 10^-7 pennies per kilobyte-hour?
It was also interesting to consider these papers in the context of E, smart contracts, financial cryptography, and a half a dozen other concepts. Still a lot of things to learn...
The Agoric Papers, and a related Wired article from 1996.
Posted 2006/12/13 in programming; no comments
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