A Discriminatory Pay-as-Bid Mechanism for Efficient Scheduling in the Sun N1 Grid Engine

Grid computing is a promising concept to increase the efficiency of existing computing systems and to cut down on IT expenses by allowing the dynamic access to computer resources across geographical and organizational boundaries. These inter-organizational settings require a scheduling strategy for flexibly and efficiently matching resource requests to idle resources. Market-based mechanisms promise a good fit to grids' strategic and dynamic nature by allowing resource requesters to express valuations in addition to technical metrics. The contribution of this paper is twofold: we present a discriminatory pay-as-bid market mechanism by Sanghavi and Hajek (2004) and analytically show that it outperforms market-based proportional share - the currently most prominent grid market mechanism - with respect to both provider's surplus and allocative efficiency. We further illustrate that this mechanism is not a purely theoretical construct but that it can be integrated into the Sun Nl grid engine, a state-of-the-art grid scheduler.