OCEAN: the open computation exchange and arbitration network, a market approach to meta computing

Rapid advancements in processor and networking technologies have led to the evolution of cluster and grid computing frameworks. These high-performance computing environments exploit geographically distributed, diverse resources with the goal of providing efficient computing solutions to all kinds of parallel and distributed applications. OCEAN (Open Computation Exchange and Arbitration Network) provides a scalable market-based infrastructure to such meta-computing frameworks. OCEAN aims to build a marketplace where resources like CPU time, associated memory usage and network bandwidth are the traded commodities. This paper explains the technical challenges faced in the design of OCEAN and discusses our proposed solution. To facilitate finding suitable resources for buyers, we developed efficient matching and evolution protocols for the peer-to-peer matching network. The architecture and various components of OCEAN are described in detail. We implemented OCEAN on Java and .NET platforms and describe results from our preliminary experiments.