Efficient auction-based grid reservations using dynamic programming

Abstract

Auction mechanisms have been proposed as a means to efficiently and fairly schedule jobs in high-performance computing environments. The generalized vickrey auction has long been known to produce efficient allocations while exposing users to truth-revealing incentives, but the algorithms used to compute its payments can be computationally intractable. In this paper we present a novel implementation of the generalized vickrey auction that uses dynamic programming to schedule jobs and compute payments in pseudo-polynomial time. Additionally, we have built a version of the PBS scheduler that uses this algorithm to schedule jobs, and in this paper we present the results of our tests using this scheduler.