Arbitration policies for on-demand user-level I/O forwarding on HPC platforms

I/O forwarding is a well-established and widely-adopted technique in HPC to reduce contention in the access to storage servers and transparently improve I/O performance. Rather than having applications directly accessing the shared parallel file system, the forwarding technique defines a set of I/O nodes responsible for receiving application requests and forwarding them to the file system, thus reshaping the flow of requests. The typical approach is to statically assign I/O nodes to applications depending on the number of compute nodes they use, which is not always necessarily related to their I/O requirements. Thus, this approach leads to inefficient usage of these resources. This paper investigates arbitration policies based on the applications I/O demands, represented by their access patterns. We propose a policy based on the Multiple-Choice Knapsack problem that seeks to maximize global bandwidth by giving more I/O nodes to applications that will benefit the most. Furthermore, we propose a user-level I/O forwarding solution as an on-demand service capable of applying different allocation policies at runtime for machines where this layer is not present. We demonstrate our approach's applicability through extensive experimentation and show it can transparently improve global I/O bandwidth by up to 85% in a live setup compared to the default static policy.This study was financed by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Supenor - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001. It has also received support from the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), Brazil. It is also partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grants PID2019-107255GB; and the Generalitat de Catalunya under contract 2014-SGR-1051. The authors thankfully acknowledge the computer resources, technical expertise and assistance provided by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Experiments presented in this paper were carried out using the Grid’5000 testbed, supported by a scientific interest group hosted by Inria and including CNRS, RENATER and several Universities as well as other organizations (see https://www.grid5000.fr).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Propozycja modelu określania i wprowadzania Zielonych Praktyk w przedsiębiorstwach wykorzystujących technologie informatyczne

Green Information technology system offers opportunity for IT based organizations to act proactively in terms of environmental preservation as well as to mitigate effects of global climate change and other environmental problems. Green Information technology system adoption and implementation is a plausible attempt for IT based organizations to resolve the current environmental issues and also enhance their economic performance and possible social benefits. Currently several models and frameworks have been developed to address sustainability in various research domain. However, there are few models that can support decision making of practitioners in adopting and implementing sustainable practices in IT based organization. Therefore there is need to develop a model to assist practitioners adopt and implement sustainable practices. The proposed model comprises of Green variables, Green process and a hybrid technique of software agents and case bases reasoning. Findings from this paper shows the model variables, process, techniques applied and derived prepositions. Ongoing work involves adopting a mixed research (case study and survey) to verify the model variables, process and validate the model prepositions.Zielone technologie informatyczne ułatwiają firmom wykorzystującym technologie informatyczne (IT) podejmowanie działań na rzecz ochrony środowiska, a także tych prowadzących do zmniejszenia skali zagrożeń związanych ze zmianami klimatycznymi i innymi współczesnymi wyzwaniami ekologicznymi. Wdrażanie zielonych technologii informatycznych stanowi właściwe podejście dla firm IT nie tylko z uwagi na możliwość rozwiązywania bieżących problemów środowiskowych, ale także zwiększenia efektywności ekonomicznej i możliwych korzyści społecznych. Obecnie rozwija się wiele modeli odnoszących się do różnych aspektów zrównoważoności, jednak tylko nieliczne z nich nadają się do wykorzystania w procesie decyzyjnym firm IT. Z tej przyczyny istnieje potrzeba opracowania takiego modelu, wspierającego wprowadzanie zrównoważonych praktyk na tym poziomie. Zaproponowany model uwzględnia Zielone zmienne, Zielone procesy i połączenie techniki programowania agentowego z wnioskowaniem w oparciu o studium przypadku (CBR). Dzięki przyjęciu rozszerzonego podejścia (studium przypadku, ankieta) możliwa jest weryfikacja zmiennych modelu, procesów i potwierdzenie przyjętych założeń

UPRAVLJANJE INTERESNO-UTJECAJNIM GRUPAMA U ZDRAVSTVENOM SEKTORU: ANALIZA ODABRANE ORGANIZACIJE

In this paper, stakeholder management in healthcare viewed as a complex adaptive system has been examined on the example of the Clinical Institute of Clinical Chemistry and Biochemistry operating at the University Medical Centre Ljubljana, Slovenia. The goals of the study were to determine the nature of the stakeholder management in the chosen organization, followed by the analysis of challenges, benefi ts and infl uence on its performance as a driver for its transformation. Stakeholders were examined according to the following categorizations: primary and secondary stakeholders and real stakeholders, stakewatchers and stakekeepers. Their power, legitimacy and urgency was analyzed next, followed by examining the accepted stakeholder model. It has been determined that effective stakeholder management should be based on continuous learning of all stakeholders and about all relevant stakeholders. In this regard, good quality stakeholder management has been identifi ed as the major input for the organization’s knowledge management followed by organizational learning as a means toward achieving the goal of long-term viability. Considering the fact that there are few studies regarding stakeholder management in public organizations, this study serves to fill this gap.U ovom radu se istražuje upravljanje interesno-utjecajnim grupama u zdravstvenom sektoru kao složenom adaptivnom sustavu i to na primjeru Kliničkoga Instituta za Kliničku Kemiju i Biokemiju pri Sveučilišnom Medicinskom Centru Ljubljana, Slovenija. Ciljevi istraživanja su bili utvrditi prirodu procesa upravljanja interesno-utjecajnim grupama u odabranoj organizaciji, istražiti njegove koristi i prepreke te njegov utjecaj na djelovanje organizacije kao pokretača za njenu transformaciju. Interesno-utjecajne grupe analizirane su prema sljedećoj kategorizaciji: primarne i sekundarne grupe, prave interesno-utjecajne grupe te grupe koje nadziru organizaciju (engl. stakewatchers) te grupe koje reguliraju njeno djelovanje (engl. stakewatchers). Potom su analizirani njihovi atributi u smislu snage, legitimiteta i hitnosti djelovanja te usvojen model upravljanja odnosima s interesnoutjecajnim grupama. Utvrđeno je da se učinkovito upravljanje interesno-utjecajnim grupama treba temeljiti na kontinuiranom učenju svih dionika i o svim relevantnim dionicima. Stoga je učinkovito upravljanje interesno-utjecajnim grupama identificirano kao temeljni input u procesu organizacijskoga procesa upravljanja znanjem koje prethodi procesu organizacijskoga učenja kao načina postizanja cilja dugoročne održivosti. S obzirom na činjenicu da ima malo istraživanja o upravljanju interesno-utjecajnim grupama u javnim organizacijama, ovo istraživanje služi kao prilog u tom smislu

Adaptive and secured resource management in distributed and Internet systems

The effectiveness of computer system resource management has been always determined by two major factors: (1) workload demands and management objectives, (2) the updates of the computer technology. These two factors are dynamically changing, and resource management systems must be timely adaptive to the changes. This dissertation attempts to address several important and related resource management issues.;We first study memory system utilization in centralized servers by improving memory performance of sorting algorithms, which provides fundamental understanding on memory system organizations and its performance optimizations for data-intensive workloads. to reduce different types of cache misses, we restructure the mergesort and quicksort algorithms by integrating tiling, padding, and buffering techniques and by repartitioning the data set. Our study shows substantial performance improvements from our new methods.;We have further extended the work to improve load sharing for utilizing global memory resources in distributed systems. Aiming at reducing the memory resource contention caused by page faults and I/O activities, we have developed and examined load sharing policies by considering effective usage of global memory in addition to CPU load balancing in both homogeneous and heterogeneous clusters.;Extending our research from clusters to Internet systems, we have further investigated memory and storage utilizations in Web caching systems. We have proposed several novel management schemes to restructure and decentralize the existing caching system by exploiting data locality at different levels of the global memory hierarchy and by effectively sharing data objects among the clients and their proxy caches.;Data integrity and communication anonymity issues are raised from our decentralized Web caching system design, which are also security concerns for general peer-to-peer systems. We propose an integrity protocol to ensure data integrity, and several protocols to achieve mutual communication anonymity between an information requester and a provider.;The potential impact and contributions of this dissertation are briefly stated as follows: (1) two major research topics identified in this dissertation are fundamentally important for the growth and development of information technology, and will continue to be demanding topics for a long term. (2) Our proposed cache-effective sorting methods bridge a serious gap between analytical complexity of algorithms and their execution complexity in practice due to the increasingly deep memory hierarchy in computer systems. This approach can also be used to improve memory performance at different levels of the memory hierarchy, such as I/O and file systems. (3) Our load sharing principle of giving a high priority to the requests of data accesses in memory and I/Os timely adapts the technology changes and effectively responds to the increasing demand of data-intensive applications. (4) Our proposed decentralized Web caching framework and its resource management schemes present a comprehensive case study to examine the P2P model. Our results and experiences can be used for related and further studies in distributed computing. (5) The proposed data integrity and communication anonymity protocols address limits and weaknesses of existing ones, and place a solid foundation for us to continue our work in this important area

ODABIR MANAGERA KONTROLE KVALITETE NA OSNOVI AHP-COPRAS-G METODA: SLUČAJ U IRANU

Due to the increasing competition of globalization and fast technological improvements and world markets, demands of companies to have professional human resources are increasing too. It is an important problem of an organization to select the most appropriate personnel among the candidates. Quality control manager is important personnel in organizations and it’s so important to select the best candidate for this work. In this paper we proposed a personnel selection system based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Complex proportional assessment of alternatives with grey relations (COPRAS-G) method. At first seven criteria is identified including: knowledge of product and raw material properties, Experience and educational background, Administrative orientation, Behavioral flexibility, Risk evaluation ability, Payment and Team work and after that AHP applied for calculating weight of each criteria and finally using COPRAS- G method for selecting the best candidate for this job. This study can be used as a pattern for personnel selection and future researches.S obzirom na rastuću konkurentnost u globalizaciji te brzim tehnološkim napredovanjem na svjetskom tržištu, zahtjevi kompanija za profesionalnim kadrom se također povećavaju. Vrlo je važno za organizaciju biti u mogućnosti odabrati najbolji i najprimjereniji kadar među ponuđenim kandidatima. Manager kontrole kvalitete je važan kadar u bilo kojoj organizaciji tako da je iznimno važno za taj posao odabrati najbolje kandidate. U ovom radu predlažemo sustav odabira kadra zasnovan na analitičkom hijerarhijskom procesu (AHP) i kompleksnoj proporcionalnoj evaluaciji alternativa sa sivim odnosima (COPRAS-G). Isprva je identificirano sedam kriterija uključujući: znanje o proizvodu i svojstvima sirovine, iskustvo i obrazovanje, snalaženje s administracijom, fleksibilnost u ponašanju, sposobnost procjene rizika, plaćanja i timski rad te je zatim primijenjen AHP za izračunavanje težine svakog kriterija te je naposljetku korištena COPRAS-G metoda za odabir najboljih kandidata. Ova studija se može koristiti kao predložak za odabir kandidata i buduća istraživanja

Motivações e benefícios da certificação de sistemas de gestão de qualidade em organizações portuguesas

Num mercado global e competitivo, a certificação do sistema de gestão da qualidade tornou-se um elemento crucial para a competitividade, liderança e melhoria contínua das organizações. Neste contexto, a aplicação de modelos de gestão da qualidade, de forma dinâmica e coerente, contribui para melhorar a eficiência e eficácia de uma organização e para promover a sua competitividade. O presente trabalho tem por objetivos principais caracterizar e identificar as motivações e benefícios da certificação no sistema de gestão da qualidade referidos por uma amostra de organizações portuguesas certificadas. O estudo empírico incide numa amostra de 526 organizações certificadas no referencial ISO 9001 por uma entidade certificadora portuguesa. Foi enviado um questionário às organizações, que incidia sobre as motivações e benefícios da certificação e sobre as características da organização. Os dados recolhidos foram trabalhados com recurso a técnicas estatísticas através do programa estatístico SPSS 20.0. A partir da análise dos resultados obtidos, conclui-se que as organizações inquiridas optaram pela certificação do sistema de gestão de qualidade sobretudo por motivações internas, relacionadas com a melhoria: (i) dos processos e procedimentos; (ii) da qualidade do produto e/ou serviço e (iii) da produtividade e/ou eficiência. Por sua vez, os benefícios que consideram ter obtido com a certificação são sobretudo internos, privilegiando-se: (i) a melhoria na definição e uniformização dos procedimentos de trabalho e (ii) a melhoria da consciência da qualidade.In a global and competitive market, the certification of the quality management system has become a crucial element for competitiveness, leadership and continuous improvement of organizations. In this context, the dynamic and consistent application of quality management models helps to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization and to promote its competitiveness. This study aims to characterize and identify the motivations and benefits of certification in quality management system. The data were collected from a survey applied to a sample of Portuguese organizations certified in ISO 9001. The data were analyzed using a statistical software (SPSS 20.0.). The analyses of the results revealed that the organizations surveyed decided for certification of quality management system mainly for internal motives, related to the improvement of: (i) the processes and procedures; (ii) the quality of the product and/or service and (iii) the productivity and/or efficiency. In turn, the organizations considered that the benefits obtained from certification are mainly internal, namely: (i) standardization of processes and procedures and (ii) improvement of quality-consciousness

A STUDY INTO MOTIVATION AND SATISFACTION OF CROATIAN EMPOLYEES

Motivirani zaposlenici postižu višu radnu uspješnost, a time raste i ukupna uspješnost organizacije te njena konkurentnost na tržištu. Pritom motivacijski sustav organizacije mora biti oblikovan tako da zadovolji potrebe i želje većeg broja zaposlenika te usmjeren na podizanje individualne radne uspješnosti stvarajući i nagrađujući poželjne oblike ponašanja. Primjeren i djelotvoran motivacijski sustav uključuje i više različitih oblika nagrađivanja, kao i pravednost pri raspodjeli nagrada zaposlenicima. Motiviranost i zadovoljstvo zaposlenih važni su parametri ocjene primjerenosti sustava motivacije u organizacijama. Svrha ovog rada je utvrditi razinu motivacije i zadovoljstva zaposlenika te prema tome odrediti jesu li u organizacijama potrebne promjene u sustavu motivacije. Ciljevi istraživanja su: utvrditi razinu motiviranosti i zadovoljstva zaposlenika pojedinim faktorima, prikupiti saznanja o zainteresiranosti nadređenih, ali i same organizacije o motiviranosti i zadovoljstvu zaposlenika, istražiti namjere zaposlenih u pogledu promjene radnog mjesta te saznati koliko je motivacijski sustav koji organizacije koriste usklađen sa željama zaposlenika. Istraživanje je provedeno od 18. travnja do 18. svibnja 2015. godine na uzorku od 165 ispitanika korištenjem online anketnog upitnika. Nakon provedene deskriptivne statističke analize moguće je utvrditi srednju razinu motiviranosti i zadovoljstva zaposlenika. Najveći broj ispitanika izdvojio je „sigurnost posla“ kao faktor najviše razine motivacije te „redovitost isplate plaće“ kao element kojim su u najvećoj mjeri zadovoljni u organizacijama u kojima su zaposleni, što odražava dugotrajno nepovoljno gospodarsko okruženje i rast broja nezaposlenih. „Mogućnost za napredovanje“ faktor je čijim su izostankom ispitanici u najvećoj mjeri nezadovoljni.Motivated employees achieve better work performance, thereby increasing the overall performance of an organisation and its competitiveness in the market. The motivational system of an organization must be designed to meet the needs and wishes of a large number of employees and to aim at improving individual work performance by creating and rewarding desirable behaviour. An adequate and effective motivational system includes several different forms of rewards, as well as fairness in the distribution of rewards to employees. Employees’ motivation and satisfaction are important parameters in evaluating the appropriateness of the motivation system in organizations. The purpose of this study is to determine the level of employees’ motivation and satisfaction and, therefore, determine whether organizations require changes in the motivation system. The research objectives are: to determine the employees’ level of motivation and satisfaction concerning specific factors, to collect information about the interest superiors, but also the organization itself, demonstrate concerning employees’ motivation and satisfaction, to explore the intentions of employees about changing their position, to ascertain to what extent the motivational system that organizations use is in compliance with the wishes of employees. The survey was conducted from 18 April to 18 May, 2015 on a sample of 165 respondents using an online questionnaire. After the descriptive statistical analysis was conducted, it is possible to determine the medium level of motivation and satisfaction of employees. The largest number of the respondents selected "job security" as the most motivating factor and "regularity of salary payments" as an element they are mostly satisfied with in the organization where they work. This reflects a long-term unfavourable economic environment and a rise in the number of the unemployed. "Opportunity for advancement" is a factor, which was due to its absence in organizations, rated poorly by the respondents to a great extent

Fitness problem in shift workers while adjusting in ever changing working schedule

The present study was aimed to assess the diurnal variations in few physiological processes in rotational shift workers suffering irregular life styles due tohaving regular and/or irregular workload during night shift. The diurnal variations in rest-activity was monitored, using wrist actigraphy, in cohorts of 14 shift workers (SWs) employed in the Sponge Iron Manufacturing Industry (SIMI) and 20 shift workers (SWs) of the Chhattisgarh State Electricity Board (CSEB). The former organization adopts regular rotational shift system and the latter an irregular rotational shift pattern. SWs of both organizations worked in a counterclockwise 3-shift system. All SWs were provided an actiwatch around the clock covering all three shifts to monitor their sleep-wake activity pattern. One-minute epoch length was chosen for collection of wrist actigraphy data. Data were analyzed using computations of dichotomy index (I<O) and autocorrelation coefficient (r24). The irregular rotational SWs from CSEB took rest/ nap/ sleep in the night shift while on duty. Therefore, the activity pattern of these subjects was somewhat similar to that of the day workers. Results of the present study showed that autocorrelation coefficient was significantly (p < 0.05) lower in irregular rotational shift workers as compared to regular rotational shift workers only during the morning shift. There are no statistically significant differences between the means of r24 obtained for the morning, afternoon, and night shifts, when values were compared separately for each organization. Further, the regular rotational SWs exhibited significantly lower dichotomy index during night shift as compared to morning shift