The bin packing problem has been the corner stone of approximation algorithms and has been extensively studied starting from the early seventies. In the classical bin packing problem, we are given a list of real numbers in the range (0, 1], the goal is to place them in a minimum number of bins so that no bin holds numbers summing to more than 1. In this thesis we study approximation algorithms for three generalizations of bin packing: geometric bin packing, vector bin packing and weighted bipartite edge coloring. In two-dimensional (2-D) geometric bin packing, we are given a collection of rectangular items to be packed into a minimum number of unit size square bins. Geometric packing has vast applications in cutting stock, vehicle loading, pallet packing, memory allocation and several other logistics and robotics related problems. We consider the widely studied orthogonal packing case, where the items must be placed in the bin such that their sides are parallel to the sides of the bin. Here two variants are usually studied, (i) where the items cannot be rotated, and (ii) they can be rotated by 90 degrees. We give a polynomial time algorithm with an asymptotic approximation ratio of $\ln(1.5) + 1 \approx 1.405$ for the versions with and without rotations. We have also shown the limitations of rounding based algorithms, ubiquitous in bin packing algorithms. We have shown that any algorithm that rounds at least one side of each large item to some number in a constant size collection values chosen independent of the problem instance, cannot achieve an asymptotic approximation ratio better than 3/2. In d-dimensional vector bin packing (VBP), each item is a d-dimensional vector that needs to be packed into unit vector bins. The problem is of great significance in resource constrained scheduling and also appears in recent virtual machine placement in cloud computing. Even in two dimensions, it has novel applications in layout design, logistics, loading and scheduling problems. We obtain a polynomial time algorithm with an asymptotic approximation ratio of $\ln(1.5) + 1 \approx 1.405$ for 2-D VBP. We also obtain a polynomial time algorithm with almost tight (absolute) approximation ratio of $1+\ln(1.5)$ for 2-D VBP. For $d$ dimensions, we give a polynomial time algorithm with an asymptotic approximation ratio of $\ln(d/2) + 1.5 \approx \ln d+0.81$. We also consider vector bin packing under resource augmentation. We give a polynomial time algorithm that packs vectors into $(1+\epsilon)Opt$ bins when we allow augmentation in (d - 1) dimensions and $Opt$ is the minimum number of bins needed to pack the vectors into (1,1) bins. In weighted bipartite edge coloring problem, we are given an edge-weighted bipartite graph $G=(V,E)$ with weights $w: E \rightarrow [0,1]$. The task is to find a proper weighted coloring of the edges with as few colors as possible. An edge coloring of the weighted graph is called a proper weighted coloring if the sum of the weights of the edges incident to a vertex of any color is at most one. This problem is motivated by rearrangeability of 3-stage Clos networks which is very useful in various applications in interconnected networks and routing. We show a polynomial time approximation algorithm that returns a proper weighted coloring with at most $\lceil 2.2223m \rceil$ colors where $m$ is the minimum number of unit sized bins needed to pack the weight of all edges incident at any vertex. We also show that if all edge weights are $>1/4$ then $\lceil 2.2m \rceil$ colors are sufficient.

Le Cloud est devenu une plate-forme très répandue pour le déploiement d'applications distribuées. Beaucoup d'entreprises peuvent sous-traiter leurs infrastructures d'hébergement et, ainsi, éviter des dépenses provenant d'investissements initiaux en infrastructure et de maintenance.Des petites et moyennes entreprises, en particulier, attirés par le modèle de coûts sur demande du Cloud, ont désormais accès à des fonctionnalités comme le passage à l'échelle, la disponibilité et la fiabilité, qui avant le Cloud étaient presque réservées à de grandes entreprises.Les services du Cloud peuvent être offerts aux utilisateurs de plusieurs façons. Dans cette thèse, nous nous concentrons sur le modèle d'Infrastructure sous Forme de Service. Ce modèle permet aux utilisateurs d’accéder à des ressources de calcul virtualisés sous forme de machine virtuelles (MVs).Pour installer une application distribuée, un client du Cloud doit d'abord définir l'association entre son application et l'infrastructure. Il est nécessaire de prendre en considération des contraintesde coût, de ressource et de communication pour pouvoir choisir un ensemble de MVs provenant d'opérateurs de Cloud publiques et privés le plus adaptés. Cependant, étant donné la quantité exponentiel de configurations, la définition manuelle de l'association entre application et infrastructure peut être un challenge dans des scénarios à large échelle ou ayant des contraintes importantes de temps. En effet, ce problème est une généralisation du problème de calcul de homomorphisme de graphes, qui est NP-complet.Dans cette thèse, nous adressons le problème de calculer des placements initiaux et de reconfiguration pour des applications distribuées sur potentiellement de multiples Clouds. L'objectif est de minimiser les coûts de location et de migration en satisfaisant des contraintes de ressources et communications. Pour cela, nous proposons des heuristiques performantes capables de calculer des placements de bonne qualité très rapidement pour des scénarios à petite et large échelles. Ces heuristiques, qui sont basées sur des algorithmes de partition de graphes et de vector packing, ont été évaluées en les comparant avec des approches de l'état de l'art comme des solveurs exactes et des méta-heuristiques. Nous montrons en utilisant des simulations que les heuristiques proposées arrivent à calculer des solutions de bonne qualité en quelques secondes tandis que des autres approches prennent des heures ou jours pour les calculer. / The Cloud has become a very popular platform for deploying distributed applications. Today, virtually any credit card holder can have access to Cloud services. There are many different ways of offering Cloud services to customers. In this thesis we especially focus on theInfrastructure as a Service (IaaS), a model that, usually, proposes virtualized computing resources to costumers in the form of virtual machines (VMs). Thanks to its attractive pay-as-you-use cost model, it is easier for customers, specially small and medium companies, to outsource hosting infrastructures and benefit of savings related to upfront investments and maintenance costs. Also, customers can have access to features such as scalability, availability, and reliability, which previously were almost exclusive for large companies. To deploy a distributed application, a Cloud customer must first consider the mapping between her application (or its parts) to the target infrastructure. She needs to take into consideration cost, resource, and communication constraints to select the most suitable set of VMs, from private and public Cloud providers. However, defining a mapping manually may be a challenge in large-scale or time constrained scenarios since the number of possible configuration explodes. Furthermore, when automating this process, scalability issues must be taken into account given that this mapping problem is a generalization of the graph homomorphism problem, which is NP-complete.In this thesis we address the problem of calculating initial and reconfiguration placements for distributed applications over possibly multiple Clouds. Our objective is to minimize renting and migration costs while satisfying applications' resource and communication constraints. We concentrate on the mapping between applications and Cloud infrastructure. Using an incremental approach, we split the problem into three different parts and propose efficient heuristics that can compute good quality placements very quickly for small and large scenarios. These heuristics are based on graph partition and vector packing heuristics and have been extensively evaluated against state of the art approaches such as MIP solvers and meta-heuristics. We show through simulations that the proposed heuristics manage to compute solutions in a few seconds that would take many hours or days for other approaches to compute.