Abstract
This paper deals with the file allocation problem [6] concerning the dynamic optimization of communication costs to access data in a distributed environment. We develop a dynamic file re-allocation strategy that adapts on-line to a sequence of read and write requests whose location and relative frequencies are completely unpredictable. This is achieved by replicating the file in response to read requests and migrating the file in response to write requests while paying the associated communications costs, so as to be closer to processors that access it frequently. We develop first explicit deterministic on-line strategy assuming existence of global information about the state of the network; previous (deterministic) solutions were complicated and more expensive. Our solution has (optimal) logarithmic competitive ratio. The paper also contains the first explicit deterministic data migration [7] algorithm achieving the best known competitive ratio for this problem. Using somewhat different technique, we also develop the first deterministic distributed file allocation algorithm (using only local information) with poly-logarithmic competitive ratio against a globally optimized optimal prescient strategy.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-40 |
| Number of pages | 40 |
| Journal | Information and Computation |
| Volume | 185 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 25 Aug 2003 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:∗Corresponding author. Fax: +972-3-640-9357. E-mail addresses: baruch@theory.lcs.mit.edu (B. Awerbuch), yairb@math.tau.ac.il (Y. Bartal), fiat@math.tau.ac.il (A. Fiat). 1Supported by Air Force Contract TNDGAFOSR-86-0078, ARO Contract DAAL03-86-K-0171, NSF Contract 9114440-CCR, DARPA Contract N00014-J-92-1799, and a special grant from IBM. 2Research supported in part by Ben Gurion Fellowship, The Ministry of Science and Arts. 3Supported by a grant from the Israeli Academy of Sciences.