Steady-State Analysis of Load Balancing with Coxian-22 Distributed Service Times

This paper studies load balancing for many-server ($N$ servers) systems. Each server has a buffer of size $b-1,$ and can have at most one job in service and $b-1$ jobs in the buffer. The service time of a job follows the Coxian-2 distribution. We focus on steady-state performance of load balancing policies in the heavy traffic regime such that the normalized load of system is $\lambda = 1 - N^{-\alpha}$ for $0<\alpha<0.5.$ We identify a set of policies that achieve asymptotic zero waiting. The set of policies include several classical policies such as join-the-shortest-queue (JSQ), join-the-idle-queue (JIQ), idle-one-first (I1F) and power-of-$d$-choices (Po$d$) with $d=O(N^\alpha\log N)$. The proof of the main result is based on Stein's method and state space collapse. A key technical contribution of this paper is the iterative state space collapse approach that leads to a simple generator approximation when applying Stein's method

Отображение различий в восприятии времени и временной перспективы носителей украинской, американской и французской культур

У статті досліджено показники монохронності та поліхронності у сприйнятті часу представників української, американської та французької культур.In this article the indexes are probed in perception of time of representatives of the Ukrainian, American and French cultures.В статье исследованы показатели монохронности и полихронности в восприятии времени представителей украинской, американской и французской культур

Kinetic modelling of quantitative proteome data predicts metabolic reprogramming of liver cancer

BACKGROUND: Metabolic alterations can serve as targets for diagnosis and cancer therapy. Due to the highly complex regulation of cellular metabolism, definite identification of metabolic pathway alterations remains challenging and requires sophisticated experimentation. METHODS: We applied a comprehensive kinetic model of the central carbon metabolism (CCM) to characterise metabolic reprogramming in murine liver cancer. RESULTS: We show that relative differences of protein abundances of metabolic enzymes obtained by mass spectrometry can be used to assess their maximal velocity values. Model simulations predicted tumour-specific alterations of various components of the CCM, a selected number of which were subsequently verified by in vitro and in vivo experiments. Furthermore, we demonstrate the ability of the kinetic model to identify metabolic pathways whose inhibition results in selective tumour cell killing. CONCLUSIONS: Our systems biology approach establishes that combining cellular experimentation with computer simulations of physiology-based metabolic models enables a comprehensive understanding of deregulated energetics in cancer. We propose that modelling proteomics data from human HCC with our approach will enable an individualised metabolic profiling of tumours and predictions of the efficacy of drug therapies targeting specific metabolic pathways

Asymptotics of Insensitive Load Balancing and Blocking Phases

International audienceLoad balancing with various types of load information has become a key component of modern communication and information systems. In many systems, characterizing precisely the blocking probability allows to establish a performance trade-off between delay and losses. We address here the problem of giving robust performance bounds based on the study of the asymptotic behavior of the insensitive load balancing schemes when the number of servers and the load scales jointly. These schemes have the desirable property that the stationary distribution of the resulting stochastic network depends on the distribution of job sizes only through its mean. It was shown that they give good estimates of performance indicators for systems with finite buffers, generalizing henceforth Erlang's formula whereas optimal policies are already theoretically and computationally out of reach for networks of moderate size. We study a single class of traffic acting on a symmetric set of processor sharing queues with finite buffers and we consider the case where the load scales with the number of servers. We characterize the response of symmetric systems under those schemes at different scales and show that three amplitudes of deviations can be identified according to whether ρ 1. A central limit scaling takes place for a sub-critical load; for ρ = 1, the number of free servers scales like n^{θ/(θ+1)} (θ being the buffer depth and n being the number of servers) and is of order 1 for super-critical loads. This further implies the existence of different phases for the blocking probability. Before a (refined) critical load ρ_c (n) = 1 − a*n^{θ/(θ+1)} , the blocking is exponentially small and becomes of order n^{θ/(θ+1)} at ρ_c (n). This generalizes the well-known Quality and Efficiency Driven (QED) regime or Halfin-Whitt regime for a one-dimensional queue, and leads to a generalized staffing rule for a given target blocking probability