Details: The Bidding System

We make On Demand Computing available for bidding, no minimum, no reserve.

By policy the Lightlink system will be built on a "foundation" and "edifice." The foundation will be a commodity style bidding system, the edifice will be everything else that differentiates Lightlink from other providers.

The fair market bidding price will be calculated in real time according to the bids that are running, possibly an average of the bids in the run queue.

Both wait and run queues, along with all bids including maximum bids will be fully available for the end customers to view, including a visually easy to understand historical recordof the market rate over time along with minimum and maximum price that ran during a day.

FOUNDATION

BIDDING CUSTOMERS

The foundation will be a commodity style bidding system for those that want rock bottom prices with wait time and risk of not running. The more wait time and risk that the customer can tolerate, the lower their bid will be.

It is conceivable that bids that are too low many never run, or if they start, never finish, should market price rise to new levels.

Bidding will be on a cents per cpu-hour basis, but position in the wait queue will be based on total value of bid, price times cpu-hours.

Wait time includes intra job wait time, meaning a job that is running can be requeued at hourly intervals if higher bidding jobs come in. Thus if someone bids late night prices and the job starts running at 10pm, it may run until 10am when it gets out bid and stays dormant until 10pm the next night when it can start running again.

The job priority queue will be calculated every hour at the checkpoint time, and jobs that are out bid will be requeued, and new higher bidding jobs will be started.

After a customer has chosen their package, number of cpus, desired number of hours etc, they will have access to a sliding control that will automatically compute for them their expected wait and finish time for every possible bid between the present min and the max in the running queue. They can set the slider to an acceptable mix of wait, risk and finish time, and the system will choose their bid to match it.

Customers may change their bid at any time, either up or down which will be reflected at the next checkpoint interval. Thus if a job gets requeued due to too low a bid, the customer can up the bid, and the job will supplant other lower jobs at the next checkpoint interval.

Customers may optionally choose auto bidding which will minimize their cost to run based on their maximum bid.  This means their running price may change at each checkpoint interval, going up during the day, and floating down to night time rates at night.  Auto bidding will guarantee them the lowest possible price, but may not guarantee they won't get interrupted or requeued if their maximum bid is too low relative to other's maximum bids.

Customers may optionally choose a second form of auto bidding which will maximize their chances of staying in the queue rather than minimum cost, again protected by a maximum bid.

INTERACTIVE JOBS

For a premium over the real time market price, a customer may elect to have one or more machines made available to them on an interactive basis.

RUN IT NOW

For a premium over the real time market price, customers may opt to run their job now, obviating a wait time until the next check point interval (once an hour).

Their job will interrupt a lower bid running job which will be checkpointed immediately.

UNINTERRUPTIBLE

For a premium over the real time market price, customers may opt to have their jobs be uninterruptible. As there can only be so many uninterruptible jobs at a time in the queue, these will be offered on a first come first served basis.

RESERVED TIME

For a premium over the real time market price, customers may opt to have time reserved in the future. The actual price the job will run at will be based on the fair market price at the time the job runs plus the premium.

PRICE IT NOW.

For a premium over the realtime market price, customers may opt to have time reserved in the future which is priced now at a contract rate.

EDIFICE

The edifice part of the Lightlink system will be those value added services that differentiate ourselves from the pure commodity market, tech support, consulting, packaging and custom programming.

Please direct all questions to Homer Wilson Smith.