A heuristic approach to generating file spanning trees for reliability analysis of distributed computing systems

The reliability of Distributed Computing Systems (DCS) in terms of Distributed Program Reliability (DPR) and Distributed System Reliability (DSR) has been studied intensively. Current reliability algorithms available for the analysis of DPR and DSR include MFST, FARE, FST, and FST-SPR. This paper presents a reliability algorithm, called HRFST, that eliminates the need to search a spanning tree during each subgraph generation. The HRFST algorithm reduces both the number of subgraphs (or trees) generated and the actual execution time required for analysis of DPR and DSR. Examination of several sample cases shows that the HRFST algorithm is more efficient than the FST-SPR algorithm.