89,655 research outputs found
The economics of accreditation
This paper is a report on a research project on the economics of accreditation in the UK. The
main motivation and objective for the study is to have available a detailed analysis of how the
accreditation system impinges on important aspects of economic life, such as innovation and
business and economic performance. It aims to improve the general understanding of the
benefits of using accredited conformity assessment and to help businesses make informed
decisions when procuring conformity assessment and related services. It is also intended to be
helpful to government by supporting evidence-based policy making in relation to
accreditation and conformity assessmen
A Low Cost Two-Tier Architecture Model For High Availability Clusters Application Load Balancing
This article proposes a design and implementation of a low cost two-tier
architecture model for high availability cluster combined with load-balancing
and shared storage technology to achieve desired scale of three-tier
architecture for application load balancing e.g. web servers. The research work
proposes a design that physically omits Network File System (NFS) server nodes
and implements NFS server functionalities within the cluster nodes, through Red
Hat Cluster Suite (RHCS) with High Availability (HA) proxy load balancing
technologies. In order to achieve a low-cost implementation in terms of
investment in hardware and computing solutions, the proposed architecture will
be beneficial. This system intends to provide steady service despite any system
components fails due to uncertainly such as network system, storage and
applications.Comment: Load balancing, high availability cluster, web server cluster
A Real-time Network Emulator: ADLARS Case Study
As testing and benchmarking performance of
web services and networked applications has proven to
be cost-effective, and crucial in some applications,
increased significance has been attached to the
development of hardware and software network
emulators and simulators. In this paper, we discuss a
possible design of a light-w eight real-time IP network
emulator that can provide the same functionality and
performance as hardware simulators. Also, as the
systematic software engineering discipline has become a
necessity in the software development life-cycle, we
present a possible approach, utilizing mature software
engineering disciplines, for building the software
architecture of the emulator. We then use ADLARS [1],
an A rchitecture D escription Language for Real-time
Systems developed within our research team to describe
the architecture. The emulator’s architecture serves as a
good test-bed for our ADL because of its real-time and
concurrent nature. We conclude by testing our design
and presenting a possible JAVA instantiation of the
emulator over a UNIX system
Innovation dynamics and the role of infrastructure
This report shows how the role of the infrastructure – standards, measurement,
accreditation, design and intellectual property – can be integrated into a quantitative
model of the innovation system and used to help explain levels and changes in
labour productivity and growth in turnover and employment. The summary focuses
on the new results from the project, set out in more detail in Sections 5 and 6. The
first two sections of the report provide contextual material on the UK innovation
system, the nature and content of the infrastructure knowledge and the institutions
that provide it.
Mixed modes of innovation, the typology of innovation practices developed and
applied here, is constituted of six mixed modes, derived from many variables taken
from the UK Innovation Survey. These are:
Investing in intangibles
Technology with IP innovating
Using codified knowledge
Wider (managerial) innovating
Market-led innovating
External process modernising.
The composition of the innovation modes, and the approach used to compute them,
is set out in more detail in Section 4. Modes can be thought of as the underlying
process of innovation, a bundle of activities undertaken jointly by firms, and whose
working out generates well known indicators such as new product innovations, R&D
spending and accessing external information, that are the partial indicators gathered
from the innovation survey itself
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