9,204 research outputs found

    Autonomous resource-aware scheduling of large-scale media workflows

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    The media processing and distribution industry generally requires considerable resources to be able to execute the various tasks and workflows that constitute their business processes. The latter processes are often tied to critical constraints such as strict deadlines. A key issue herein is how to efficiently use the available computational, storage and network resources to be able to cope with the high work load. Optimizing resource usage is not only vital to scalability, but also to the level of QoS (e.g. responsiveness or prioritization) that can be provided. We designed an autonomous platform for scheduling and workflow-to-resource assignment, taking into account the different requirements and constraints. This paper presents the workflow scheduling algorithms, which consider the state and characteristics of the resources (computational, network and storage). The performance of these algorithms is presented in detail in the context of a European media processing and distribution use-case

    Informatics Research Institute (IRIS) December 2003 newsletter

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    OSS integration issues and community support: an integrator perspective

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    The reuse and integration of Open Source Software (OSS) components provided by OSS communities is becoming an economical and strategic need for today’s organizations. The integration of OSS components provides many benefits, but also risks and challenges. One of the most important risks is the lack of effective and timely OSS community support for dealing with possible integration problems. For gaining an understanding of the common problems that organizations face when integrating OSS components, and the role played by OSS communities, we performed an exploratory study on 25 OSS integration projects from different European organizations. The results show that the main way of reducing integration problems was the use of OSS components from well-established communities; therefore very few integration problems were identified. In most of the cases these problems were successfully solved with the support from the OSS community and/or colleagues. In addition, contrary to the common belief that understanding code from someone else is a hard and undesirable task, some integrators consider OSS code even more understandable than their own code.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

    Grantmaker's Guide: Strengthening International Indigenous Philanthropy

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    As members of International Funders for Indigenous Peoples (IFIP), we are anxious to grow the field and bring an infusion of new faces, sources of investment and expertise, along with the professional camaraderie that grows from shared commitment and passion. IFIP is an affinity group of the Council on Foundations dedicated to assembling international grantmakers in support of Indigenous philanthropies and fostering funding partnerships to improve the lives of Indigenous People globally. Over the past decade, IFIP has convened conferences and workshops that catalyze thoughtful, engaged collaboration among participants.Experienced donors recognize the resilience of Indigenous Peoples, often in the face of overwhelming odds and continual attacks on many fronts. Their diversity and creativity is an essential resource for the future of our planet. There is important work of global significance underway. Nevertheless, there are technical challenges that this guide can help identify and overcome. Many standard practices simply won't work. We need to be on the ground listening to people and stretching our imaginations. We cannot wait for the 'experts' to send us polished proposals that meet our criteria and timetables. Truly effective philanthropy has always relied on ingenuity and creative paths of understanding to effect deep change in the world.We can embrace and drive this change. This guide describes the practical experiences of those pioneers who have forged ahead

    Human factors and the WWW : making sense of URLs

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    We present a study of how WWW users ‘make sense’ of URLs. Experiments were used to investigate users’ capacity to employ the URL as a surrogate for the resource to which it refers. The results show that users can infer useful information from URLs, but that such improvisation has shortcomings as a navigation aid

    Informatics Research Institute (IRIS) July 2004 newsletter

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    This summer period has been rich in presence and dissemination related activities. Several important conferences, which have enjoyed a great international participation and success, have been organized by IRIS academics in Salford. These include NLDB04, CRIS 2004 and the LTSN workshop. Also, a substantial number of research projects have been secured from national as well as European funding sources. All these activities are contributing to reinforcing the leading position that IRIS is currently enjoying in the field of Informatics. This newsletter gives an overview of all research activities that took place during this reporting period. It is hoped that this will help trigger further collaboration with existing and future colleagues from academia, research and industry to work together towards addressing the many societal and technological challenges engendered by the information age

    Informatics Research Institute (IRIS) December 2006 newsletter

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    Architecture of Environmental Risk Modelling: for a faster and more robust response to natural disasters

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    Demands on the disaster response capacity of the European Union are likely to increase, as the impacts of disasters continue to grow both in size and frequency. This has resulted in intensive research on issues concerning spatially-explicit information and modelling and their multiple sources of uncertainty. Geospatial support is one of the forms of assistance frequently required by emergency response centres along with hazard forecast and event management assessment. Robust modelling of natural hazards requires dynamic simulations under an array of multiple inputs from different sources. Uncertainty is associated with meteorological forecast and calibration of the model parameters. Software uncertainty also derives from the data transformation models (D-TM) needed for predicting hazard behaviour and its consequences. On the other hand, social contributions have recently been recognized as valuable in raw-data collection and mapping efforts traditionally dominated by professional organizations. Here an architecture overview is proposed for adaptive and robust modelling of natural hazards, following the Semantic Array Programming paradigm to also include the distributed array of social contributors called Citizen Sensor in a semantically-enhanced strategy for D-TM modelling. The modelling architecture proposes a multicriteria approach for assessing the array of potential impacts with qualitative rapid assessment methods based on a Partial Open Loop Feedback Control (POLFC) schema and complementing more traditional and accurate a-posteriori assessment. We discuss the computational aspect of environmental risk modelling using array-based parallel paradigms on High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms, in order for the implications of urgency to be introduced into the systems (Urgent-HPC).Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, 1 text box, presented at the 3rd Conference of Computational Interdisciplinary Sciences (CCIS 2014), Asuncion, Paragua

    Informatics Research Institute (IRIS) June 2001 newsletter

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    Welcome to the first edition of the Information Systems Institute's Research Newsletter. This Newsletter will be published four times a year (March, June, September and December), and will be published on the ISI research web page. The aim of the Newsletter is to facilitate the exchange of information related to research activities in ISI. Submissions are welcome from staff and research students
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