Assignment #1 for Introduction to Simulation (Spring 1999)

Situation:

Your are a consultant to an on-line "Web Mall" that uses ten Web servers. Every morning at 9:00am the ten servers are re-booted for the day's business. If one or more of the ten servers fail on boot-up, the mall cannot open for business until the failed server(s) are fixed. Assume that the probability of a server failing boot-up is 1% (or, on average 1 in 100 boot-ups fail). Your client wants to know the percentage of days that the Mall opens on time (i.e., that ten servers successfully boot-up).

Requirement:

Write a program to help you determine the following: You may not use a theoretical calculation to solve this problem (we will learn in class that this is a very simple problem to solve theoretically). You must model the actual power-up/failure of servers.

Guidelines:

Here as3_99_1.c, is a skeleton of the program you are to complete. Note that you need to insert code (or comments) where I have placed a meta-comment delimited by &&&. In reality, you have about three lines (!) of code to write. Carefully study the programming style of the program (e.g.,the header format, comments, etc.). This is the required programming style for program submissions. You are to submit a program listing (".c" file), an executable (".exe") and a sheet of paper with the answer to the requirement as stated when simulated for 1000, 10000, 100000, and 1000000 days of operation (i.e., you will have 4 separate numerical answers).

Extra Credit:

For 10 points (maximum of 110) extra credit, determine the benefits that can be gained by having a redundant 11th server. Submit the .c, .exe, and a sheet of paper with the answer to this extra credit requirement.

Last updated by Ken Christensen on JANUARY 3, 1999