Survey on job scheduling mechanisms in grid environment

Grid systems provide geographically distributed resources for both computational intensive and data-intensive applications.These applications generate large data sets.However, the high latency imposed by the underlying technologies; upon which the grid system is built (such as the Internet and WWW), induced impediment in the effective access to such huge and widely distributed data.To minimize this impediment, jobs need to be scheduled across grid environments to achieve efficient data access.Scheduling multiple data requests submitted by grid users onto the grid environment is NP-hard.Thus, there is no best scheduling algorithm that cuts across all grids computing environments.Job scheduling is one of the key research area in grid computing.In the recent past many researchers have proposed different mechanisms to help scheduling of user jobs in grid systems.Some characteristic features of the grid components; such as machines types and nature of jobs at hand means that a choice needs to be made for an appropriate scheduling algorithm to march a given grid environment.The aim of scheduling is to achieve maximum possible system throughput and to match the application needs with the available computing resources.This paper is motivated by the need to explore the various job scheduling techniques alongside their area of implementation.The paper will systematically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of some selected approaches in the area of grid jobs scheduling.This helps researchers better understand the concept of scheduling, and can contribute in developing more efficient and practical scheduling algorithms.This will also benefit interested researchers to carry out further work in this dynamic research area

Rental index rate as an alternative to interest rate in Musharakah Mutanaqisah home financing

Purpose This paper aims to propose a new pricing alternative called Rental Rate Index (RR-I) that captures the true value of property to be used by Islamic banks in Musharakah Mutanaqisah (MM) contract for home financing. Design/methodology/approach By formulating a profit rate based on Rental Index (RI) and House Price Index (HPI), the proposed rate eliminates conventional profit rate benchmarking, and, at the same time, suggests a fair, equitable and sustainable financing.This new RR-I (measured by RPI/HPI) enables computerization of the MM system in home financing to be easily implemented.A financial simulation is developed to demonstrate the feasibility of this newly proposed rate. Findings This newly proposed RR-I is found to be more stable, having less fluctuations, resilient to macroeconomic conditions and yet comparable to the conventional interest rates, without depending on them. It can also be regarded as a rate that is fair and sustainable to both the customer and the bank, as it measures the actual rate of return to both parties in MM contract.Research limitations/implications The paper confines one contract, namely, MM, as it is claimed to be more Shariah-compliant than others.Practical implications The finding also sheds some light on the recommendation by Bank Negara Malaysia, which is to consider RR that is more indicative of the actual rental price while taking into account the competitiveness of the product. (BNM, 2007). Social implications This paper wreaks customer patronage in selecting the contract of home financing.Originality/value This paper attempts to resolve the issue of benchmarking RR to the conventional interest rate in the MM contract. Studies conducted on this issue via simulation approach are meager

Macroeconomic shocks, fragility and home financing in Malaysia: can rental index be the answer?

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the interactions among macroeconomic variable shocks, banking fragility and home financing provided by conventional and Islamic banks in Malaysia. Identifying the causes of financial instability and the effects of macroeconomic shocks can help to foil the onset of future financial turbulence. Design/methodology/approach: The autoregressive distributed lag bound-testing cointegration approach, impulse response functions (IRFs) and forecast error variance decomposition are used in this study to unravel the long-run and short-run dynamics among the selected macroeconomic variables and amount of home financing offered by both conventional and Islamic banks. In addition, the study uses Granger causality tests to investigate the short-run causalities among the selected variables to further understand the impact of one macroeconomic shock to Islamic and conventional home financing.Findings:This study provides evidence that macroeconomic shocks have different long-run and short-run effects on amount of home financing offered by conventional and Islamic banks. Both in the long run and short run, home financing provided by Islamic banks is more linked to real sector economy and thus is more stable as compared to home financing provided by conventional banks. The Granger causality test reveals that only gross domestic product (GDP), Kuala Lumpur Syariah Index (KLSI)/Kuala Lumpur Composite Index (KLCI) and house price index (HPI) are found to have a statistically significant causal relationship with home financing offered by both conventional and Islamic banks. Unlike the case of Islamic banks, conventional home financing is found to have a unidirectional causality with interest rates.Research limitations/implications This study has focused on analyzing the macroeconomic shocks on home financing. However, this study does not assess the impact of financial deregulation and enhanced information technology on amount of financing offered by both conventional and Islamic banks. In addition, it is not within the ambit of this present study to examine the effects of agency costs and information asymmetry.Practical implications: The analysis of cointegration and IRFs exhibits that in the long run and short run, home financing provided by Islamic banks are more linked to real sector economy like GDP and House Prices (HPI) and therefore more resilient to economic vulnerabilities as compared to home financing provided by conventional banks. However, in the long run, both conventional and Islamic banks are more susceptible to fluctuations in interest rates. The results of the study suggest that monetary policy ramifications to improve banking fragility should focus on stabilizing interest rates or finding an alternative that is free from interest.Social implications: Because interest plays a significant role in pricing of home loans, the potential of an alternative such as rental rate is therefore timely and worth the effort to investigate further. Therefore, Islamic banks can explore the possibility of pricing home financing based on rental rate as proposed in this study. Originality/value: This paper examines the unresolved issues in Islamic home financing where Islamic banks still benchmark their products especially home financing, to interest rates in dual banking system such as in the case of Malaysia. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, studies conducted in this area are meager and therefore is imperative to be examined

A systematic analysis and review on producer mobility management in named data networks: Research background and challenges

The effectiveness of the current Internet architecture has been challenged due to the exponential and revolutionary expansion of smart mobile devices and content requirements. Therefore, the underlying solutions, such as Named Data Networks (NDN), is designed to achieve a highly efficient architecture for content delivery and to manage mobile devices in the network. Mobility is becoming a more exciting and hotly debated topic nowadays as it plays an increasingly significant role in the expanding trend of network device mobilisation. Thus, this study deliberates one of the emerging popular mobility issues in NDN and enlightens both consumer and producer mobility. While NDN paradigm made possible the consumer mobility by establishing the in-network caching functionality, producer mobility is still struggling to manage content distribution. The mobile producer handoff process confronting several challenges due to lack of new location update towards the network. Although, the research community has discovered numerous improvements related to producer mobility, but the network is still experiencing long handoff latency and packet loss. Therefore, this paper critically examined the substantial research works on producer mobility that have already been completed and struggling to achieve the desired level of mobility support in NDN. This survey categorizes producer mobility solutions into five different approaches depending on their characteristics and functionalities. In addition, it also measured the performance of each mobile producer approach in terms of handoff latency through network analysis model. Moreover, the research problems and long-standing challenges among the approaches have been summarised and suggested an intuitive direction through network analysis results

Utilization of information system towards resolving trust issue in zakat distribution

Zakat is considered to be one of the five central pillar of Islam, the only one dealing directly with the social and economic aspect of the Islamic ummah. In order to achieve its intended objectives, it is critically important to ensure that the two major aspects of zakat management – collection and distribution is handled in the most effective way. Furthermore, the effectiveness of collection and distribution is very much dependent on the existence of the element of trust in the implementation of the two aspects. Increment in collection amount of zakat is very much dependent on the level of trust of zakat payer towards the zakat authority. Trust in turn, is very much a result of an effective zakat distribution mechanism. The central pivot of an effective zakat management thus revolves around the level of trust towards zakat implementation mechanism. This study proposes the usage of information technology to improve the implementation of zakat distribution which in turn increase the level of trust towards zakat management in Kedah. The increase level of trust will further trigger more collection from zakat payer. We have developed a model based on the current zakat management structure in Kedah. The model then will be used as the basis to create an information system specifically to simplify the process of asnaf identification and reporting in zakat distribution process

The implementation of ipV6 human capacity development program for public sectors in Malaysia: a community ktp project

In order to remain an important part of the global Internet and to benefit from its growth, Malaysian organizations such as Government agencies, Internet and content service providers, and enterprises must embrace the transition to the new Internet Protocol version 6 or IPv6. The key to a successful transition is the readiness of human resource in adopting and adapting the new Internet technology. The KTP IPv6 Project attempts to assist Malaysian public sectors in building their human capacity in IPv6 technology. The initial aim of the project is to train some 500 public sector ICT personnel to familiarize and possible to certify them on the IPv6 technology. The internal training for trainer program started in April 2012 until end of August 2012. Besides that, this training was extended to train a group of external trainers from Politeknik Sultan Azlan Shah (PSAS) in Behrang, Perak. The PSAS trainers successfully completed their training and passed the locally-developed certification program called the Certified InterNetWorks Professional in IPv6 (CIPv6). Collaborations with government ministries, various state governments, local agencies and statutory bodies such as MARA and LHDN, as well as educational institutions such as universities, polytechnics and matriculation colleges have resulted in a series of training sessions which spanned until end of June 2014, with a total participation of 803 personnel, making an average of 80 personnel trained per month. With the progress, the project has successfully overachieved the Knowledge Transfer Program (KTP) project target to transfer IPv6 knowledge to more than 800 ICT personnel in the public sector