Characterizing and Improving the Reliability of Broadband Internet Access

In this paper, we empirically demonstrate the growing importance of reliability by measuring its effect on user behavior. We present an approach for broadband reliability characterization using data collected by many emerging national initiatives to study broadband and apply it to the data gathered by the Federal Communications Commission's Measuring Broadband America project. Motivated by our findings, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a practical approach for improving the reliability of broadband Internet access with multihoming.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, 6 table

Worldwide Distribution of the MYH9 Kidney Disease Susceptibility Alleles and Haplotypes: Evidence of Historical Selection in Africa

MYH9 was recently identified as renal susceptibility gene (OR 3–8, p<10−8) for major forms of kidney disease disproportionately affecting individuals of African descent. The risk haplotype (E-1) occurs at much higher frequencies in African Americans (≥60%) than in European Americans (<4%), revealing a genetic basis for a major health disparity. The population distributions of MYH9 risk alleles and the E-1 risk haplotype and the demographic and selective forces acting on the MYH9 region are not well explored. We reconstructed MYH9 haplotypes from 4 tagging single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) spanning introns 12–23 using available data from HapMap Phase II, and by genotyping 938 DNAs from the Human Genome Diversity Panel (HGDP). The E-1 risk haplotype followed a cline, being most frequent within sub-Saharan African populations (range 50–80%), less frequent in populations from the Middle East (9–27%) and Europe (0–9%), and rare or absent in Asia, the Americas, and Oceania. The fixation indexes (FST) for pairwise comparisons between the risk haplotypes for continental populations were calculated for MYH9 haplotypes; FST ranged from 0.27–0.40 for Africa compared to other continental populations, possibly due to selection. Uniquely in Africa, the Yoruba population showed high frequency extended haplotype length around the core risk allele (C) compared to the alternative allele (T) at the same locus (rs4821481, iHs = 2.67), as well as high population differentiation (FST(CEU vs. YRI) = 0.51) in HapMap Phase II data, also observable only in the Yoruba population from HGDP (FST = 0.49), pointing to an instance of recent selection in the genomic region. The population-specific divergence in MYH9 risk allele frequencies among the world's populations may prove important in risk assessment and public health policies to mitigate the burden of kidney disease in vulnerable populations

Centrality evolution of the charged-particle pseudorapidity density over a broad pseudorapidity range in Pb-Pb collisions at root s(NN)=2.76TeV

Peer reviewe

Event Services for High Performance Computing

The Internet and the Grid are changing the face of high performance computing. Rather than tightly-coupled SPMD-style components running in a single cluster, on a parallel machine, or even on the Internet programmed in MPI, applications are evolving into sets of collaborating elements scattered across diverse computational elements. These collaborating components may run on different operating systems and hardware platforms and may be written by different organizations in different languages. Complete &quot;applications&quot; are constructed by assembling these components in a plug-and-play fashion. This new vision for high performance computing demands features and characteristics not easily provided by traditional highperformance communications middleware. In response to these needs, we have developed ECho, a high-performance event-delivery middleware that meets the new demands of the Grid environment. ECho provides efficient binary transmission of event data with unique features that support data-type discovery and enterprise-scale application evolution. We present measurements detailing ECho&apos;s performance to show that ECho significantly outperforms other systems intended to provide this functionality and provides throughput and latency comparable to the most efficient middleware infrastructures available

Characterizing And Predicting Tcp Throughput On The Wide Area Network

... This paper addresses this issue. We begin by statistically characterizing the TCP throughput on the Internet, exploring the strong correlation between TCP flow size and throughput, and the transient end-to-end throughput distribution. We then analyze why benchmarking fails to predict large transfers, and propose a novel yet simple prediction model based on our observations. Our prototype