On program and file assignment for distributed systems

For distributed computing system, the system reliability which is an important quality and performance metric, depends mainly on the allocation of various resources such as the assignment of executed programs and stored files. This paper first develops a general reliability based optimization model followed by an exhaustive search algorithm and a genetic algorithm to solve the model. The steps of the algorithm are described and numerical examples are used to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of the two algorithms. The genetic algorithm can generally achieve near-optimal results within a limited amount of computational time, and hence recommended for large distributed systems.