background and objectives: we developed and evaluated the utility of a quadruplex taqman real-time pcr assay that allows simultaneous identification of vancomycin-resistant genotypes and clinically relevant enterococci. materials and methods: the specificity of the assay was tested using reference strains of vancomycin-resistant and susceptible enterococci. in total, 193 clinical isolates were ...

With enhanced capabilities of portable devices such as PMPs and MP3 players, the application range supported by a single portable device is extended widely. For example, not only traditional realtime programs like a video player, but also interactive applications such as web browsers and text editors are supported together. This requires the redesign of legacy portable devices that have been de...

Two important characteristics encountered in many real-world scheduling problems are heterogeneous processors and a certain degree of uncertainty about the sizes of jobs. In this paper we address both, and study for the first time a scheduling problem that combines the classical unrelated machine scheduling model with stochastic processing times of jobs. By means of a novel time-indexed linear ...

Most scheduling models assume that the jobs have xed processing times. However, in real-life applications the processing time of a job often depends on the amount of resources such as facilities, manpower , funds, etc. allocated to it, and so its processing time can be reduced when additional resources are assigned to the job. A scheduling problem in which the processing times of the jobs can b...

This paper presents the initial step of an aid design method earmarked for operational validation of hard real-time systems. We consider systems that are composed of sequential hard real-time jobs, which are embedded on centralized multiprocessor architectures. We introduce a model based upon untimed finite automata and meant to collect the operational behaviours of the system compatible with i...

Grid computing is a high performance computing environment to solve larger scale computational applications. Grid computing contains resource management, job scheduling, security problems, information management and so on. Job scheduling is a fundamental and important issue in achieving high performance in grid computing systems. However, it is a big challenge to design an efficient scheduler a...