Predicting Needs as a Buyer. It is difficult to describe precisely the level of resources required to run an ex- periment or job. Depending on the inputs to a program, the ideal level of resource consumption can vary dramat- ically. Moreover, there is a tangible penalty formisestimating resource need, since these bids are made in advance of when the resources will actually be available. In order to match enough buyers with sellers, current market-based resource allocation schemes batch allocations into blocks of time. The time scale of this batch system can be min- utes or days ahead of when the resources will actually be made available. This means that users must predict their.
