Minimal Economic Distributed Computing

In an ideal distributed computing infrastructure, users would be able to use diverse distributed computing resources in a simple coherent way, with guaranteed security and efficient use of shared resources in accordance with the wishes of the owners of the resources. Our strategy for approaching this ideal is to first find the simplest structure within which these goals can plausibly be achieved. This structure, we find, is given by a particular recursive distributive lattice freely constructed from a presumed partially ordered set of all data in the infrastructure. Minor syntactic adjustments to the resulting algebra yields a simple language resembling a UNIX shell, a concept of execution and an interprocess protocol. Persons, organizations and servers within the system express their interests explicitly via a hierarchical currency. The currency provides a common framework for treating authentication, access control and resource sharing as economic problems while also introducing a new dimension for improving the infrastructure over time by designing system components which compete with each other to earn the currency. We explain these results, discuss experience with an implementation called egg and point out areas where more research is needed.