Trustworthy auctions for grid-style economies

Commercialisation or globalisation of large scale grids requires the provision of mechanisms to share the wide pool of grid brokered resources such as computers, software, licences and peripherals amongst many users and organisations. Quickly and efficiently servicing resource requests is critical to the efficiency of such grid based utility computing and communication providers. The CORA architecture is a market based resource reservation system that utilises a trustworthy Vickrey auction to make combinatorial allocations of resources. The primary advantage of such a scheme is that a trusted auctioneer is no longer necessary, and any system entity can safely host a trustworthy auction. This approach results in more flexibility in the design of large economic systems, with the potential for wide distribution of load amongst many auctioneers. In addition, only the winners of the auction and the prices they pay are revealed while all other bid values are kept secret. This paper also provides performance results for our implementation, that identify the constraints within which a practical trustworthy auction scheme can be implemented in a grid-style economy.