Management of Program Storage in Computers

Computer systems play an increasingly important role in modern enterprises. Such systems represent a major investment, and their performance has major effects on profitability, utilization and user satisfaction. Much effort is therefore directed at the efficient management of these systems, and this paper is a step in this direction. Specifically, we consider the optimal allocation of programs and data to various storage devices in order to minimize the expected operational costs, subject to capacity and timing constraints. This problem is one of the many optimization problems that the system management faces, and its solution, though suboptimal for the whole system, might contribute considerably to the overall system's performance and costs. An effective procedure for the optimal (storage) allocation is presented, whose application to an actual large-scale operating system resulted in high (relative) savings. This procedure, with minor modifications, might be applied to many allocation problems which face users and management of computer systems.