| Sumario: | The article reports research on "grid" or "utility" computing that would be sold by the "computon", a packet of electromagnetic energy. The efficient allocation of networked computing resources needs a market mechanism to maintain order. Bernardo Huberman, a researcher at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and his team have been trying to build this type of market mechanism. The key, Dr Huberman realised, was to have a system that can allow users to assign different priorities to tasks, to reflect their importance. It rules out a reservation-style system of the sort that airlines use, since a lot of processor cycles would end up unused, and the system would not be able to accommodate new tasks as they arose, even if they were extremely urgent. Mr Huberman's answer is Tycoon, a piece of software for computing grids that turns them into a sort of "stockmarket or clearing house". The HP team has so far tried out Tycoon on a cluster of 22 Linux servers. HP has now given Tycoon to CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory and a hotbed of grid-computing research, for more testing.
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