458,402 research outputs found
An empirical analysis ofcompetition, privatization, and regulation in telecommunications markets in Africa and Latin America
The author explores the effects of privatization, competition, and regulation on telecommunications performance in 30 African and Latin American countries from 1984 to 1997. Competition is associated with tangible benefits in terms of mainline penetration, number of pay phones, connection capacity, and reduced prices. Fixed-effects regressions reveal that competition - measured by mobile operators not owned by the incumbent telecommunications provider - is correlated with increases in the per capita number of mainlines, pay phones, and connection capacity, and with decreases in the price of local calls. Privatizing an incumbent is negatively correlated with mainline penetration and connection capacity. Privatization combined with regulation by an independent regulator, however, is positively correlated with connection capacity and substantially mitigates privatization's negative correlation with mainline penetration. Reformers are right to emphasize a combination of privatization, competition, and regulation. But researchers must explore the permutations of regulation: What type of regulation do countries adopt (price caps versus cost-of-service, for example)? How does the regulatory agency work? What is the annual budget? How many employees does it have? Where do regulators come from? What sort of training and experience do they have? What enforcement powers does the regulatory agency have? In addition, researchers must deal with endogeneity of privatization, competition, and regulation to deal with issues of casualty.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,ICT Policy and Strategies,Trade Finance and Investment,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Knowledge Economy,Economic Theory&Research,Education for the Knowledge Economy,ICT Policy and Strategies,Environmental Economics&Policies
A Bag-of-Tasks Scheduler Tolerant to Temporal Failures in Clouds
Cloud platforms have emerged as a prominent environment to execute high
performance computing (HPC) applications providing on-demand resources as well
as scalability. They usually offer different classes of Virtual Machines (VMs)
which ensure different guarantees in terms of availability and volatility,
provisioning the same resource through multiple pricing models. For instance,
in Amazon EC2 cloud, the user pays per hour for on-demand VMs while spot VMs
are unused instances available for lower price. Despite the monetary
advantages, a spot VM can be terminated, stopped, or hibernated by EC2 at any
moment.
Using both hibernation-prone spot VMs (for cost sake) and on-demand VMs, we
propose in this paper a static scheduling for HPC applications which are
composed by independent tasks (bag-of-task) with deadline constraints. However,
if a spot VM hibernates and it does not resume within a time which guarantees
the application's deadline, a temporal failure takes place. Our scheduling,
thus, aims at minimizing monetary costs of bag-of-tasks applications in EC2
cloud, respecting its deadline and avoiding temporal failures. To this end, our
algorithm statically creates two scheduling maps: (i) the first one contains,
for each task, its starting time and on which VM (i.e., an available spot or
on-demand VM with the current lowest price) the task should execute; (ii) the
second one contains, for each task allocated on a VM spot in the first map, its
starting time and on which on-demand VM it should be executed to meet the
application deadline in order to avoid temporal failures. The latter will be
used whenever the hibernation period of a spot VM exceeds a time limit.
Performance results from simulation with task execution traces, configuration
of Amazon EC2 VM classes, and VMs market history confirms the effectiveness of
our scheduling and that it tolerates temporal failures
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