A heuristic algorithm for the reliability-oriented file assignment in a distributed computing system

Distributed Computing Systems (DCS) have become a major trend in todayʹs computer system design because of their high speed and high reliability. Reliability is an important performance parameter in DCS design. Usually, designers add redundant copies of software and/or hardware to increase the systemʹs reliability. Thus, the distribution of data files can affect the program reliability and system reliability. The reliability-oriented file assignment problem is to find a file distribution such that the program reliability or system reliability is maximized. In this paper, we develop a heuristic algorithm for the reliability-oriented file assignment problem (HROFA), which uses a careful reduction 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 derivation from the exact solution is very small.