48,692 research outputs found
Reporting an Experience on Design and Implementation of e-Health Systems on Azure Cloud
Electronic Health (e-Health) technology has brought the world with
significant transformation from traditional paper-based medical practice to
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)-based systems for automatic
management (storage, processing, and archiving) of information. Traditionally
e-Health systems have been designed to operate within stovepipes on dedicated
networks, physical computers, and locally managed software platforms that make
it susceptible to many serious limitations including: 1) lack of on-demand
scalability during critical situations; 2) high administrative overheads and
costs; and 3) in-efficient resource utilization and energy consumption due to
lack of automation. In this paper, we present an approach to migrate the ICT
systems in the e-Health sector from traditional in-house Client/Server (C/S)
architecture to the virtualised cloud computing environment. To this end, we
developed two cloud-based e-Health applications (Medical Practice Management
System and Telemedicine Practice System) for demonstrating how cloud services
can be leveraged for developing and deploying such applications. The Windows
Azure cloud computing platform is selected as an example public cloud platform
for our study. We conducted several performance evaluation experiments to
understand the Quality Service (QoS) tradeoffs of our applications under
variable workload on Azure.Comment: Submitted to third IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Green
Computing (CGC 2013
Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World
This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar
16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World".
The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps
and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two
years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying
performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and
feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research
community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud
computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify
cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting
collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps.
The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD
students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior
Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance
engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current
research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research
challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations
DOH: A Content Delivery Peer-to-Peer Network
Many SMEs and non-proĀÆt organizations suĀ®er when their Web
servers become unavailable due to Ā°ash crowd eĀ®ects when their web site
becomes popular. One of the solutions to the Ā°ash-crowd problem is to place
the web site on a scalable CDN (Content Delivery Network) that replicates
the content and distributes the load in order to improve its response time.
In this paper, we present our approach to building a scalable Web Hosting
environment as a CDN on top of a structured peer-to-peer system of collaborative
web-servers integrated to share the load and to improve the overall
system performance, scalability, availability and robustness. Unlike clusterbased
solutions, it can run on heterogeneous hardware, over geographically
dispersed areas. To validate and evaluate our approach, we have developed a
system prototype called DOH (DKS Organized Hosting) that is a CDN implemented
on top of the DKS (Distributed K-nary Search) structured P2P
system with DHT (Distributed Hash table) functionality [9]. The prototype
is implemented in Java, using the DKS middleware, the Jetty web-server, and
a modiĀÆed JavaFTP server. The proposed design of CDN has been evaluated
by simulation and by evaluation experiments on the prototype
Energy-aware Load Balancing Policies for the Cloud Ecosystem
The energy consumption of computer and communication systems does not scale
linearly with the workload. A system uses a significant amount of energy even
when idle or lightly loaded. A widely reported solution to resource management
in large data centers is to concentrate the load on a subset of servers and,
whenever possible, switch the rest of the servers to one of the possible sleep
states. We propose a reformulation of the traditional concept of load balancing
aiming to optimize the energy consumption of a large-scale system: {\it
distribute the workload evenly to the smallest set of servers operating at an
optimal energy level, while observing QoS constraints, such as the response
time.} Our model applies to clustered systems; the model also requires that the
demand for system resources to increase at a bounded rate in each reallocation
interval. In this paper we report the VM migration costs for application
scaling.Comment: 10 Page
Taxonomic classification of planning decisions in health care: a review of the state of the art in OR/MS
We provide a structured overview of the typical decisions to be made in resource capacity planning and control in health care, and a review of relevant OR/MS articles for each planning decision. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, to position the planning decisions, a taxonomy is presented. This taxonomy provides health care managers and OR/MS researchers with a method to identify, break down and classify planning and control decisions. Second, following the taxonomy, for six health care services, we provide an exhaustive specification of planning and control decisions in resource capacity planning and control. For each planning and control decision, we structurally review the key OR/MS articles and the OR/MS methods and techniques that are applied in the literature to support decision making
Managing at the Speed of Light: Improving Mission-Support Performance
The House and Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittees requested this study to help DOE's three major mission-support organizations improve their operations to better meet the current and future needs of the department. The passage of the Recovery Act only increased the importance of having DOE's mission-support offices working in the most effective, efficient, and timely manner as possible. While following rules and regulations is essential, the foremost task of the mission-support offices is to support the department's mission, i.e., the programs that DOE is implementing, whether in Washington D.C. or in the field. As a result, the Panel offered specific recommendations to strengthen the mission-focus and improve the management of each of the following support functions based on five "management mandates":- Strategic Vision- Leadership- Mission and Customer Service Orientation- Tactical Implementation- Agility/AdaptabilityKey FindingsThe Panel made several recommendations in each of the functional areas examined and some overarching recommendations for the corporate management of the mission-support offices that they believed would result in significant improvements to DOE's mission-support operations. The Panel believed that adopting these recommendations will not only make DOE a better functioning organization, but that most of them are essential if DOE is to put its very large allocation of Recovery Act funding to its intended uses as quickly as possible
Fathers and work-life balance in France and the UK : policy and practice
Purpose ā This paper focuses on the role of organizations in mediating the impact of national work-life balance (WLB) policy on employees, in particular fathers.
Design/methodology/approach ā It presents existing research about WLB policy implementation in organizations as well as the findings of empirical work in insurance and social work in France and the UK (questionnaire survey, case study analysis, interviews with national and sector-level trade union officials).
Findings & Practical implications ā These indicate that fathersā take-up of WLB policies is the outcome of a complex dynamic between national fatherhood regimes, organizational and sector characteristics and the individual employee. They suggest that fathers tend to use WLB measures to spend time with their families where measures increase their sense of entitlement (state policies of paternity leave) or where measures offer non-gendered flexibility (reduced working time/organizational systems of flexi-time). In line with other studies it also finds that fathers extensively use informal flexibility where this is available (individual agency). These findings have implications for way WLB policies are framed at national and organizational level.
Originality/value - Cross-national comparative research into WLB policy and practice at national and organizational level is very rare. The empirical work presented in this article, although exploratory, makes a significant contribution to our understanding of WLB policy and practice, particularly as it relates to fathers
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