Cost-oriented task allocation and hardware redundancy policies in heterogeneous distributed computing systems considering software reliability

Task allocation policy and hardware redundancy policy for distributed computing system (DCS) are of great importance as they affect many system characteristics such as system cost, system reliability and performance. In recent years, abundant research has been carried out on the optimal task allocation and/or hardware redundancy problem, most of which took a reliability-oriented approach, i.e., the optimization criterion was system reliability maximization. Nevertheless, besides system reliability, other system characteristics such as system cost may be of great concern to management. In this paper, we take a cost-oriented approach to the optimal task allocation and hardware redundancy problem for DCS, which addresses both system cost and system reliability issues. A system cost model which could reflect the impact of system unreliability on system cost is developed, and by minimizing the total system cost, a satisfactory level of system reliability could be reached simultaneously. In the reliability modeling and analysis of DCS, we take both hardware reliability and software reliability into account. Two numerical examples are given to illustrate the formulation and solution procedures, in which genetic algorithm is used. Results show that based on the developed system cost model, appropriate decision-makings on task allocation and hardware redundancy policies for DCS could be made, and the result obtained seems to be a fairly good trade-off between system cost and system reliability.