Distributed computations driven by resource consumption

Millions of computers are now connected together by the Internet. At a fast pace, applications are taking advantage of these new capabilities, and are becoming parallel and distributed, e.g. applets on the WWW or agent technology. As we live in a world with finite resources, an important challenge is to be able to control computations in such an environment. For instance, a user might like to suspend a computation because another one seems to be more promising. We present a paradigm that allows the programmer to monitor and control computations, whether parallel or distributed, by mastering their resource consumption. We describe an implementation on top of the thread library PPCR (M. Weiser et al., 1989) and the message passing library Nexus (I. Foster et al., 1996).