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Competitive Hill-Climbing Strategies for Replica Placement in a Distributed File System

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Distributed Computing (DISC 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2180))

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Abstract

The Farsite distributed file system stores multiple replicas of files on multiple machines, to provide file access even when some machines are unavailable. Farsite assigns file replicas to machines so as to maximallyexploit the different degrees of availabilityof different machines, given an allowable replication factor R. We use competitive analysis and simulation to study the performance of three candidate hillclimbing replica placement strategies, MinMax, MinRand, and RandRand, each of which successivelyexc hanges the locations of two file replicas. We show that the MinRand and RandRand strategies are perfectlycomp etitive for R = 2 and 2/3-competitive for R = 3. For general R, MinRand is at least 1/2-competitive and RandRand is at least 10/17-competitive. The MinMax strategyis not competitive. Simulation results show better performance than the theoretic worst-case bounds.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, 98052, USA

    John R. Douceur & Roger P. Wattenhofer

Authors
  1. John R. Douceur
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  2. Roger P. Wattenhofer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843-3112, USA

    Jennifer Welch

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Douceur, J.R., Wattenhofer, R.P. (2001). Competitive Hill-Climbing Strategies for Replica Placement in a Distributed File System. In: Welch, J. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2180. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45414-4_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45414-4_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42605-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45414-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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