Branch Prediction is an important factor in achieving high performance in modern microprocessors. Branch predictors are used to keep pipeline filled with instructions before the outcome of the branch condition is known. On the other hand, branch misprediction halts fetching of useful instructions. The situation becomes worse when we take into account the cache pollution a branch misprediction c...

Risk is mitigated in the course of reliable prediction. A probabilistic model is proposed to predict the risk effects on time and cost of construction projects. Project managers and consultants can use the model in estimating project cost and duration based on historic data. Statistical regression models and sample tests are developed using real data of 140 projects. The research objective is t...

In this paper we discuss the concept of space-time diagrams as a representation of the execution of an application, and then give a method, based on critical path analysis, for calculating nontrivial upper bounds on the potential parallelism, known as the average parallelism, a complement to the speedup and efficiency.

The notions of the critical path of events and critical time of an event are key concepts in analyzing the performance of a parallel discrete event simulation. The highest critical time of any event in a simulation is a lower bound on the time it takes to execute a simulation using any conservative simulation mechanism, and is also a lower bound on the time taken by some optimistic methods. How...

We study the problem of the manager of a project consisting of two sub-projects or tasks which are outsourced to different subcontractors. The project manager earns more revenue from the project if it is completed faster, but he cannot observe how hard subcontractors work, only the stochastic duration of their tasks. We derive the optimal linear incentive contracts to offer to the subcontractor...

The trend towards larger structures and aggressive clock frequencies has been a fundamental driving force for modern microprocessor design. While one approach is to deeply pipeline any high delay structure, dependencies and critical loops have made it increasingly difficult to speed execution through extensive pipelining. One alternative is to remove larger structures from the critical path. We...

Understanding dictated short-messages requires the system to perform speech recognition on the user’s speech. This speech recognition process is prone to errors. If the system can automatically detect the presence of an error, it can use dialog to clarify or correct its transcript. In this work, we present our analysis on what types of errors a recognition system makes, and propose a method to ...

The rotary pipeline processor is a new architecture for superscalar computing. It is based on a simple and regular pipeline structure which can support several ALUs for efficient dispatching of multiple instructions. Register values flow around a rotary pipeline, constrained by local data dependencies. During normal operation the control circuits are not on the critical path and performance is ...

The classical PERT approach uses the path with the largest expected duration as the critical path to estimate the probability of completing a network by a given deadline. However, in general, such a path is not the most critical path (MCP) and does not have the smallest estimate for the probability of completion time. The main idea of this paper is derived from the domination structure between ...

Effective and detailed planning of large-scale, complex construction projects is of great importance to fulfilling project cost and time objectives. At Tsinghua University of China and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the four dimensional-computer aided design (4D construction operations simulation methodology have been researched for years respectively, resulting in innovative, in constru...