Distributed clusters like the Grid and PlanetLab enable the same statistical multiplexing efficiency gains for computing as the Internet provides for networking. One major challenge is allocating resources in an economically efficient and low-latency way. A common solution is proportional-share, where users each get resources in proportion to their pre-defined weight. However, this does not allow users to differentiate the value of their jobs. This leads to economic inefficiency. In contrast, systems that require reservations impose a high latency (typically minutes to hours) to acquire resources.

Tycoon, a market based distributed resource allocation system based on proportional share, is presented. The key advantages of Tycoon are that it allows users to differentiate the value of their jobs, its resource acquisition latency is limited only by communication delays, and it imposes no manual bidding overhead on users. Experimental results using a prototype implementation of the design are presented.