Distributed Environment

Global companies that experimented extensive waterfall phased plans are trying to improve their existing processes to expedite team engagement. SCRUM has become an acceptable path to follow for those companies because it comprises project management as part of its practices. SCRUM has been used with the objective of simplifying project control through simple processes, easy to update documentation and higher team iteration over exhaustive documentation. Instead of investing team effort on producing static documentation, SCRUM proposes to focus on team continuous improvement aiming to add value to business processes. The purpose of this industry report is to describe two projects that experimented SCRUM practices within a globally distributed company. This company has development centers across North America, South America and Asia. This report covers challenges faced by the project teams, strengths and practical recommendations of using SCRUM in a globally distributed environment.

Mobile education or M-Education is a new conceptual paradigm in the use of mobile and wireless technologies for education. M-Education encourages distributed peer collaboration over wireless devices and desktop computers to create opportunities for discovery and education in the field and community. It is a project-oriented approach that will use a wireless virtual community to facilitate the learning activities of teachers, students, and peers through collaboration in a distributed environment. M-Education is significantly ...

Internet, a client/server system, is a perfect means of GIS data accessing, analyzing and transmission. The World Wide Web, FTP (file transfer protocol) and HTTP programs make it convenient to access and transfer data files across the Internet. Using Internet for GIS makes it easy access to acquire GIS data from diverse data sources in the distributed environment. The geospatial multicriteria decision analysis in a client/server environment is an important and challenging task for the GIS community because of narrow Internet bandwidth for large geospatial data sets. In the present paper, we are developing a multicriteria decision analysis tool for spatial decision making in the web GIS environment. The developed system has been demonstrated for biodiversity conservation and priorities. An attempt has been made to generate the alternative decisions based on priority vectors. The multicriteria technique of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to derive the eigen vectors with the given multiple constraints of conflicting criteria and aims at selecting optimal alternative from the available sets. However, the evaluation recognizes the importance of expert knowledge when assigning the weights for the best spatial priorities. Comparing within classes and alternatives using judgment and decision matrix is based on Saaty’s Pairwise Comparison. The Multicriteria Spatial Decision Support System (MC-SDSS) software development uses ASP, ArcIMS 9.0, ArcSDE9.0 and Oracle 9i data server in the web GIS environment. The database organization of spatial and non-spatial data is done in the RDBMS environment using ArcSDE and Oracle 9i data server.

Page 1. Trust Management System for Grid and Cloud Resources Paul D Manuel", S. Thamarai Selve and Mostafa Ibrahim Abd-EI Barr' Paul D Manuel' Dept. of Information Science, College for Women, Kuwait University, Kuwait p.manuel@ku.edu.kw Abstract ...

Mobile education or M-Education is a new conceptual paradigm in the use of mobile and wireless technologies for education. M-Education encourages distributed peer collaboration over wireless devices and desktop computers to create opportunities for discovery and education in the field and community. It is a project-oriented approach that will use a wireless virtual community to facilitate the learning activities of teachers, students, and peers through collaboration in a distributed environment. M-Education is significantly ...

Although Finland is one of the most advanced and competitive economies in the world, with a sophisticated technological infrastructure, only four per cent of Finnish wage earners regard themselves as doing telework, and a further four per cent had tried telework. Empirical evidence of telework is presented in this paper.

Large scale search engines nowadays use distributed Web crawlers to collect Web pages because it is impractical for a single machine to download the entire Web. Load balancing of such crawlers is an important task because of limitations in memory/resources of each crawling machine. Existing distributed crawlers use simple URL hashing based on site names as their partitioning policy. This can be done in a distributed environment using consistent hashing to dynamically manage joining and leaving of crawling nodes. This method is formally claimed to be load balanced in cases that hashing method is uniform. Given that the Web structure abides by power law distribution according to existing statistics, we argue that it is not at all possible for a uniform random hash function based on site's URL to be load balanced for case of large scale distributed Web crawlers. We show the truth of this claim by applying Web statistics to consistent hashing as it is used in one of famous Web crawlers. We also report some experimental results to demonstrate the effect of load balancing when we just rely on hash of host names.

In distribution problems, a fleet of vehicles serves the demand of a set of customers. Each customer is typically served by a single vehicle. However, more cost effective distribution plans may exist if some customers are served by more than one vehicle, i.e., if some deliveries are split. We characterize distribution environments in which allowing split deliveries is likely to

The evolution of commodity computing lead to the possibility of efficient usage of interconnected machines to solve computationally-intensive tasks, which were previously solvable only by using expensive supercomputers. This, however, required new methods for process scheduling and distribution, considering the network latency, communication cost, heterogeneous environments and distributed computing constraints. An efficient distribution of processes over such environments requires an adequate scheduling strategy, as the cost of inefficient process allocation is unacceptably high. Therefore, a knowledge and prediction of application behavior is essential to perform effective scheduling.In this paper, we overview the evolution of scheduling approaches, focusing on distributed environments. We also evaluate the current approaches for process behavior extraction and prediction, aiming at selecting an adequate technique for online prediction of application execution. Based on this evaluation, we propose a novel model for application behavior prediction, considering chaotic properties of such behavior and the automatic detection of critical execution points. The proposed model is applied and evaluated for process scheduling in cluster and grid computing environments.The obtained results demonstrate that prediction of the process behavior is essential for efficient scheduling in large-scale and heterogeneous distributed environments, outperforming conventional scheduling policies by a factor of 10, and even more in some cases. Furthermore, the proposed approach proves to be efficient for online predictions due to its low computational cost and good precision.

We have implemented a software management tool-set which addresses the problems of compilation and distribution of software across multiple architectures in a mixed-vendor distributed environment. This package, which we call rtools, is made up of: a central database, a compilation tool, and a distribution tool. We describe the system in detail and look at possible implementations of rtools in other

Grid computing infrastructures embody a cost-effective computing paradigm that virtualises heterogeneous system resources to meet the dynamic needs of critical business and scientific applications. These applications range from batch processes and long-running tasks to real-time and even transactional applications. Grid computing environments are inherently dynamic and unpredictable environments sharing services amongst many different users. Grid schedulers aim to make the most efficient use of Grid resources (high utilisation) while providing the best possible performance to the Grid applications (reducing makespan) and satisfying the associated performance and Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. Additionally, in commercial Grid settings where economic considerations are an increasingly important part of Grid scheduling, it is necessary to minimise the cost of application execution on the behalf of the Grid users while ensuring that the applications meet their QoS constraints. Furthermore, efficient resource allocation may allow a resource broker to maximise their profit by minimising the quantity of resource procurement. Scheduling in such a large-scale, dynamic and distributed environment is a complex undertaking. In this paper, we propose an approach to Grid scheduling which abstracts over the details of individual applications, focusing instead on the global cost optimisation problem while taking into account the entire workload, dynamically adjusting to the varying service demands. Our model places particular emphasis on the stochastic and unpredictable nature of the Grid, leading to a more accurate reflection of the state of the Grid and hence more efficient and accurate scheduling decisions.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are emerging as powerful platforms for distributed embedded computing supporting a variety of high-impact applications. However programming WSN applications is a complex task which requires suitable paradigms and technologies ...

Information technology (IT) is the facilitator for successful implementation of distributed-work. However, research on the implication of different types of IT in distributed-work in an organization is limited. The aim of our research was to study the distributed-worker’s media use empirically, and determine the influential factors that affect the media selection and its effect on distributed-work. To achieve the objectives of the research, a hypothetical model that shows the relationships between media use and contextual factors, individual characteristics, media richness, and social influence was developed and validated. Distributed-workers’ day-to-day, job related, communication information was collected through log-sheets. Data analysis showed that simple communication media, such as telephone and e-mail, is effective enough for carrying out job related activities from remote sites. Contextual, individual, and social level factors were found to influence the media selection of distributed-workers. Though, e-mail is thought to be a lean medium in media richness theory, this study shows that e-mail oriented workers use it effectively even for complex communication tasks, such as discussion.

It is an established fact that the use of computers in design and manufacturing constitutes the most significant opportunity for substantial productivity gain in industry. It has now been widely accepted that the future of manufacturing organizations will be information-oriented, knowledge driven and much of their daily operations will be automated around the global information network that connects everyone together.

In this article, we present MADIK, a Multi-Agent Digital Investigation ToolKit to help experts during the forensic examination process. MADIK uses a four layer multi-agent architecture, as a metaphor to the organizational hierarchy levels: strategic, tactical, operational and specialist. The proposed architecture and tool was developed under a blackboard approach, implemented with Java Agent DEvelopment Framework - JADE, using Java Expert System Shell - JESS as an inference engine. We have done some experiments with MADIK using real data, on stand alone and distributed environments with encouraging results.

Periodic behavior is common in real-world applications. However in many cases, periodicities are partial in that they are present only intermittently. The authors study such intermittent patterns, which they refer to as p-patterns. The formulation of p-patterns takes into account imprecise time information (e.g., due to unsynchronized clocks in distributed environments), noisy data (e.g., due to extraneous events), and shifts in phase and/or periods. We structure mining for p-patterns as two sub-tasks: (1) finding the periods of p-patterns and (2) mining temporal associations. For (2), a level-wise algorithm is used. For (1), we develop a novel approach based on a chi-squared test, and study its performance in the presence of noise. Further we develop two algorithms for mining p-patterns based on the order in which the aforementioned sub-tasks are performed: the period-first algorithm and the association-first algorithm. Our results show that the association-first algorithm has a higher tolerance to noise; the period-first algorithm is more computationally efficient and provides flexibility as to the specification of support levels. In addition, we apply the period-first algorithm to mining data collected from two production computer networks, a process that led to several actionable insights

We propose using trace-based assessment of the performance of distributed file systems (DFS) under transactional IO load. The assessment includes simulations and experiments using the IO traces. Our experiments suggest that DFS, and specifically XtreemFS have a good potential to support transactional IO load in distributed environments: they demonstrate good performance, high availability and scalability, while at the same time

This paper describes the architecture for the distributed CAPS system (DCAPS). The system accomplishes distributed software prototyping with legacy module reuse. Prototype System Description Language (PSL), the prototyping language, is used to describe real-time software in the DCAPS system. PSDL specifies not only real-time constraints, but also the connection and interaction among software components. Automatic generation of software wrappers and glue is applied for the normalization of data transfer between legacy systems. Implementation of the DCAPS communication layer is based on the JavaSpacesTM library. DCAPS supports collaborative prototype design in a distributed environment