Buying and selling computational power over the network

Powerful processors and high-bandwidth communications which are available provide a very large amount of cycles at supercomputer speeds. This can serve emerging data-intensive applications which require extremely high data rates. Workstations equipped with such processors are often utilized for a fraction of the time and sit idle otherwise. It may become possible to sell and buy computational power over the network in the same way that electrical power is sold and bought by utilities over the power grid today. Potential buyers are users in need of more cycles than those provided by their own workstations. A request made by a potential buyer can be directed to any of the sellers and a best match of buyer and seller (trading) has to be made. For scalability, traders use an extended version of the adaptive partitioning algorithm which may be applicable whenever mutual interest is clearly defined, i.e. a seller is interested in finding a buyer and vice versa. It is shown that server or client selection for buying or selling computation power over the network using adaptive partitioning is simple and efficient