The Nom Profit-Maximizing Operating System [pdf]

More details can be found in Muli Ben-Yehuda's thesis:

http://www.mulix.org/pubs/theses/nom-msc-2015-15.pdf

From the abstract:

> In the near future, cloud providers will sell their users virtual machines with CPU, memory, network, and storage resources whose prices constantly change according to market-driven supply and demand conditions. Running traditional operating systems in these virtual machines is a poor fit: traditional operating systems are not aware of changing resource prices and their sole aim is to maximize performance with no consideration of costs. Consequently, they yield low profits.

> We present nom, a profit-maximizing operating system designed for cloud computing platforms with dynamic resource prices.

This reminds me of some earlier papers about using linear optimization techniques to rebalance servers across cloud hosts based on changing spot prices, like "Cost minimization for provisioning virtual servers in amazon elastic compute cloud"