A HEURISTIC ALGORITHM FOR THE RELIABILITY-ORIENTED FILE ASSIGNMENT INA DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SYSTEM

Distributed Computing Systems (DCS) have become a major trend in today 's computer system design because of their high speed and high reliabi lity. Reliability is an important performance parameter in DCS design. Usually, designers add redundant copies of software and/or hardware t o increase the system's reliability. Thus, the distribution of data fi les can affect the program reliability and system reliability. The rel iability-oriented file assignment problem is to find a file distributi on such that the program reliability or system reliability is maximize d. In this paper, we develop a heuristic algorithm for the reliability -oriented file assignment problem (HROFA), which uses a careful reduct ion method to reduce the problem space. Our numerical results indicate that the HROFA algorithm obtains the exact solution in most cases and the computation time is significantly shorter than that needed for an exact method. When HROFA fails to give an exact solution, the derivat ion from the exact solution is very small.