The Proportional-Share Allocation Market for Computational Resources

We study the problem of allocating shared resources, such as bandwidth in computer networks and computational resources in shared clusters, among multiple users by the proportional-share market mechanism. Under this mechanism, each user partitions his budget among the multiple resources and receives a fraction of each resource proportional to his bid. We first formulate the resource allocation game under the proportional-share mechanism and study the efficiency and fairness of the equilibrium in this game. We present analytic and simulation results demonstrating that the proportional-share mechanism achieves a reasonable balance of high degrees of efficiency and fairness at the equilibrium.