A Heuristic Task Assignment Algorithm to Maximize Reliability of a Distributed System

Conclusions Distributed systems potentially provide high reliability owing to the program and data-file redundancy possible. In many applications, high reliability is the major consideration for system design. Some work by Kumar, Hariri, Raghavendra shows that the distribution of programs and datafiles can affect the system reliability appreciably, and that redundancy in resources such as computers, programs, and data-files can improve the reliability of distributed system. This paper first formulates a practical application for a reliability-oriented distributed task assignment problem which is NP-hard. Then, to cope with this challenging problem, we p r o p a greedy algorithm, based upon some heuristics, to find an approximate solution. The simulation shows that, in most cases tested, the algorithm f ids suboptimal solutions efficiently; therefore, it is a desirable approach to solve these problems.