Design and Configuration ofDistributed Job Processing SystemsDem Fachbereich Informatikder Technischen Universita¨t Darmstadtzur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einesDoktor-Ingenieurs (Dr.-Ing.)vorgelegteDissertationvonDiplom-InformatikerThomas Risseaus Lu¨dinghausenReferent: Prof. Dr. Erich J. NeuholdKorreferent: Prof. Dr. Karl AbererTag der Einreichung: 8. Dezember 2005Tag der mu¨ndlichen Pru¨fung: 19. Januar 2006Darmstadt 2006Hochschulkennziffer: D17AbstractKeywords: Capacity planning, automatic hardware selection, automatic software configura-tion, queueing networks, scheduling, Bin StretchingA key criterion in the design, procurement and use of computer systems is performance.Performance typically means the throughput and response time of a system. The effects ofpoorly performing systems range from dissatisfied users to high penalties for companies dueto missed processing deadlines. As a result of continuously increasing hardware performance,companies often solve performance problems by replacing existing hardware with faster ma-chines. One consequence can be that they achieve a performance increase, since, for example,the processors themselves are faster, but the overall performance increase is less than expected.The reason for this is that the combination of hardware and software does not match.