The increasing use of digital documents, and the need to refer to them conveniently and unambiguously, raise an important question: can one "name" a digital document in a way that conveniently enables users to find it, and at the same time enables a user in possession of a document to be sure that it is indeed the one that is referred to by the name? One crucial piece of a complete solution to this problem would be a method that provides a cryptographically verifiable label for any bit-string (for example, the content, in a particular format, of the document). This problem has become even more acute with the emergence of the WorldWide Web, where a document (whose only existence may be on-line) is now typically named by giving its URL, which is merely a pointer to its virtual location at a particular moment in time. Using a one-way hash function to call files by their hash values is cryptographically verifiable, but the resulting names are unwieldy, because of their length and randomn...

The authors have designed and implemented an open, market-based computational system called Spawn. The Spawn system utilizes idle computational resources in a distributed network of heterogeneous computer workstations. It supports both coarse-grain concurrent applications and the remote execution of many independent tasks. Using concurrent Monte Carlo simulations as prototypical applications, the authors explore issues of fairness in resource distribution, currency as a form of priority, price equilibria, the dynamics of transients, and scaling to large systems. In addition to serving the practical goal of harnessing idle processor time in a computer network, Spawn has proven to be a valuable experimental workbench for studying computational markets and their dynamics.>

The performance of fault-stealing algorithms for very large, multipipeline systolic arrays is considered. Extensions of an existing algorithm are proposed, and with these extensions the algorithm is shown to work for large array sizes. Using the modified algorithms as a testbed, a scaling theory that predicts, on the basis of performance for a single small array, the performance of the algorithm for arbitrary array size, defect rate, and number of spares is introduced. The theory differs from current approaches in that it has both analytical and empirical components, and in that it accurately predicts system performance, rather than providing bounds on it.>