Resource and service trading in a heterogeneous large distributed system

The authors describe a new class of name and resource management facility - a trading service - which allows users of a heterogeneous large distributed system to share resources and services (resources) which are not available in their local systems. A distributed implementation of a trading service which provides name and location transparency to users is presented. This trading service is based on both attribute names and mutual cooperation of a number of independent trading servers (traders). The authors demonstrate that resource sharing among heterogeneous local systems can be achieved by introducing the concepts of export and import of resources to/from different local systems, and that a trading service based on attribute names can easily deal with name heterogeneity problems resulting from the different name schemes used by underlying local operating systems.