New Resource Control Issues in Shared Clusters

We claim that the renting of machine resources on clusters of servers introduces new systems challenges which are different from those hitherto encountered, either in multimedia systems or cluster-based computing. We characterize the requirements for such ``public computing platforms'' and discuss both how the scenario differs from more traditional multimedia resource control situations, and how some ideas from multimedia systems work can be reapplied in this new context. Finally, we discuss our ongoing work building a prototype public computing platform.