Patent ID: 7827557

Claim:
A method for allocating resources to a plurality of applications, comprising: determining, by a computer, available resources of a networked computing system, wherein the available resources comprise processing resources, networking resources, and storage resources; determining, by the computer, for each application, required resources of the application, wherein the required resources of each application specify a type of servers on which the application can be hosted, the type of servers being based on attributes of the servers including attributes relating to processor architecture and processing power, wherein the servers are part of the processing resources; determining, by the computer, an assigned subset of the available resources for each application as a function of the required resources of the application and the available resources, wherein determining the assigned subset of available resources for each application is based on a linearized objective function that reduces communication delays between resources of the subset of the available resources in conformance with bandwidth capacity requirements of the application and in conformance with network bandwidth limitations, wherein the linearized objective function includes a linear combination of variables; and associating the applications with the assigned subsets of resources.