Reliability of a Distributed Computing System With Performance Sharing

Existing research has been concentrated on improving the reliability of a distributed computing system through optimizing tasks allocation, providing software redundancy and providing hardware redundancy. None of these works considered the performance sharing mechanism in a distributed computing system. Different from other performance sharing systems whose reliability can be calculated directly, the reliability evaluation of a distributed computing system with performance sharing is more challenging since the reliability depends on the task execution time of each processor after performance sharing. This research considers a distributed computing system with performance sharing mechanism such that the computing power can be redistributed among different processors in the system. A reliability model is proposed to evaluate the distributed computing system with performance sharing. An optimization model is formulated to derive the optimal performance sharing policy such that the system reliability can be maximized. Both analytic examples and numerical examples are carried out to illustrate the proposed model and algorithm.