This paper presents and analyzes a model for the problem of placing applications on computer clusters (APP). In this problem, organizations requesting a set of software applications have to be assigned to computer clusters such that the costs of opening clusters and installing the necessary applications are minimized. This problem is related to known OR problems such as the multiproduct facility location problem and the generalized bin packing problem. We show that APP is NP-hard, and then propose a simple Tabu Search heuristic to solve it. The performance of the Tabu Search heuristic is assessed via extensive computational experiments, which indicate the promise of the proposed Tabu Search.

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doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2014.03.025, hdl.handle.net/1765/76653
ERIM Top-Core Articles
Computers & Operations Research
Erasmus Research Institute of Management

van der Gaast, J., Rietveld, N., Gabor, A., & Zhang, Y. (2014). A Tabu Search Algorithm for application placement in computer clustering. Computers & Operations Research, 50, 38–46. doi:10.1016/j.cor.2014.03.025