A method for optimizing communication paths in distributed systems

One of the challenges in designing large distributed systems is to optimize the communication and dependencies between modules, where a trade-off between performance and ressource usage often must be made. This paper suggest a simple taxonomy for comparing potential designs, and provides also an algorithm for automatically suggesting good candidates. The algorithm is compared to previous work, where it is shown to be significantly faster, while providing comparable results. The results are also shown to be near-optimal in comparison with a brute-force algorithm which is only tested for small problem instances.