The POPCORN market. Online markets for computational resources

The POPCORN project provides an infrastructure for globally distributed com putation over the whole Internet. It provides any programmer connected to t he Internet with a single huge virtual parallel computer composed of all pr ocessors on the Internet, which care to participate at any given moment. PO PCORN provides a market-based mechanism for trade in CPU time to motivate p rocessors to provide their CPU cycles for other peoples' computations. "Sel ling" CPU time is as easy as visiting a certain web site with a Java-enable d browser. "Buying" CPU time is done by writing a parallel program using th e POPCORN paradigm. A third entity in the POPCORN system is a ''market'' fo r CPU time, which is where buyers and sellers meet and trade. The POPCORN s ystem may be visited on our web-site: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/ similar to popcorn. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.