Allocating applications in distributed computing

We can use grid computing and virtualization to distribute computing applications on the Internet, letting a collection of interconnected servers host a set of applications to balance the processing load and improve performance. An important question is which applications to assign to which servers so we can meet the applications´ quality of service (QoS) goals, given the servers´ bandwidth and capacity constraints. In this column, the author precisely defines the problem and discusses a solution through a motivating numerical example.