Admission Control in a Computational Market

We propose, implement and evaluate three admission models for computational Grids. The models take the expected demand into account and offer a specific performance guarantee. The main issue addressed is how users and providers should make the tradeoff between a best effort (low guarantee) spot market and an admission controlled (high guarantee) reservation market. Using a realistically modeled high performance computing workload and utility models of user preferences, we run experiments highlighting the conditions under which different markets and admission models are efficient. The experimental results show that providers can make large efficiency gains if the admission model is chosen dynamically based on the current load, likewise we show that users have an opportunity to optimize their job performance by carefully picking the right market based on the state of the system, and the characteristics of the application to be run. Finally, we provide simple functional expressions that can guide both users and providers when making decisions about guarantee levels to request or offer.