Resource and Application Models for Advanced Grid Schedulers

As Grid computing is becoming an inevitable future, managing, scheduling and monitoring dynamic, heterogeneous resources will present new challenges. Solutions will have to be agile and adaptive, support self-organization and autonomous management, while maintaining optimal resource utilisation. Presented in this paper are basic principles and architectural concepts for efficient resource allocation in heterogeneous Grid environment

A Study of Grid Applications: Scheduling Perspective

As the Grid evolves from a high performance cluster middleware to a multipurpose utility computing framework, a good understanding of Grid applications, their statistics and utilisation patterns is required. This study looks at job execution times and resource utilisations in a Grid environment, and their significance in cluster and network dimensioning, local level scheduling and resource management

Enabling Adaptive Grid Scheduling and Resource Management

Wider adoption of the Grid concept has led to an increasing amount of federated computational, storage and visualisation resources being available to scientists and researchers. Distributed and heterogeneous nature of these resources renders most of the legacy cluster monitoring and management approaches inappropriate, and poses new challenges in workflow scheduling on such systems. Effective resource utilisation monitoring and highly granular yet adaptive measurements are prerequisites for a more efficient Grid scheduler. We present a suite of measurement applications able to monitor per-process resource utilisation, and a customisable tool for emulating observed utilisation models. We also outline our future work on a predictive and probabilistic Grid scheduler. The research is undertaken as part of UK e-Science EPSRC sponsored project SO-GRM (Self-Organising Grid Resource Management) in cooperation with BT

The Two Faces of Ballstown: Religion, Governance, and Cultural Values on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820

As the Maine back country was settled in the late eighteenth century, evangelical congregations were established in the frontier towns. This evangelical religion has been credited with fostering a fiercely independent mind-set that promoted Jeffersonian ideals of governance. This study places the political and social development of two towns, Jefferson and Whitefield, in closer perspective, showing that denominational similarities do not always lead to similar emphases on independent thought and religious diversity. Marie Sacks is an independent researcher, an archivist for the Whitefueld Historical Society, and a graduate of the American and New England Studies program at the University of Southern Maine. Before turning to history, she received a doctorate in biology and biochemistry from Brandeis University and taught biology at Simmons College in Boston. She lives in Whitefield with her husband, Julian, whose art is featured in this issue

Famciclovir (FAMVIR®)

Famciclovir is an antiviral with efficacy and safety comparable to aciclovir, but famciclovir's more favorable pharmacokinetic profile enables a less frequent dosing regimen. Future trials will likely determine famciclovir's role in the suppression of HBV

Stability for an inverse problem for a two speed hyperbolic pde in one space dimension

We prove stability for a coefficient determination problem for a two velocity 2x2 system of hyperbolic PDEs in one space dimension.Comment: Revised Version. Give more detail and correct the proof of Proposition 4 regarding the existence and regularity of the forward problem. No changes to the proof of the stability of the inverse problem. To appear in Inverse Problem

Agent-based simulation of construction workflows using a relational data model

To what extent is uncertainty concerning process status a cause of waste in construction workflows? Work studies and action research are expensive methods for investigation of such questions concerning construction workflow control policies and their results have limited applicability. Agent-based simulation (ABS) is particularly suitable for modelling peoples' behavior and interaction in complex settings, like in construction, and therefore represents an alternative. We present a parametric ABS system (EPIC 2.0) developed using a relational data model for modelling construction workflow; the model enables users to specify the construction subjects (subcontractor trade crews), their work methods, the amount of work, the workspaces (locations), dependencies between the works, etc. The simulation encapsulates both variability and uncertainty in the construction workflow. Variability arising from design changes, quality checks and working conditions may lead to random change in workload and performance. Uncertainty arises from the fact that agents do not have full or perfect information. The major advantages of this ABS system are its ability to run differently configured virtual projects in terms of work crews, locations and production system control policies and to test the relative impacts of various approaches to communication of process status information. Simulation results conclude information asymmetry causes erroneous task maturity judgments and inappropriate work assignments, and of course affects the construction workflow