The performance of distributed computing systems is partially dependent on configuration parameters recorded in configuration files. Evolutionary strategies, with their ability to have a global view of the structural information, have been shown to effectively improve performance. However, most of these methods consume too much measurement time. This paper introduces an ordinal optimization based strategy combined with a back propagation neural network for autotuning of the configuration parameters. The strat- egy was first proposed in the automation community for complex manufacturing system optimization and is customized here for improving distributed system performance. The method is compared with the covariance matrix algorithm. Tests using a real distributed system with three-tier servers show that the strategy reduces the testing time by 40% on average at a reasonable performance cost.
Data streaming applications, usually composed of sequential/parallel data processing tasks organized as a workflow, bring new challenges to workflow scheduling and resource allocation in grid environments. Due to the high volumes of data and relatively limited storage capability, resource allocation and data streaming have to be storage aware. Also to improve system performance, the data streaming and processing have to be concurrent. This study used a genetic algorithm （GA） for workflow scheduling, using on-line measurements and predictions with gray model （GM）. On-demand data streaming is used to avoid data overflow through repertory strategies. Tests show that tasks with on-demand data streaming must be balanced to improve overall performance, to avoid system bottlenecks and backlogs of intermediate data, and to increase data throughput for the data processing workflows as a whole.
