Efficient data centers, cloud computing in the future of distributed computing

Large corporations such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, use data centers to keep up with the growing demand for communication-hungry Internet services like image and video sharing, social networking, and searching. We study the problem of actually allocating the memory of servers in a data center based on online requests for storage. Given an online sequence of storage requests and a cost associated with serving the request by allocating space on a certain server, we use two efficient algorithms for selecting the minimum number of servers and of the minimum total cost. We show that both algorithms perform almost optimal when the requests have totally random values.