Saving internal program data for further use is one of the most useful ideas in programming. Developing general features to provide such data saving/ restoring is a very active research area. There are two application areas for such features we believe to be crucial: system fault tolerance and data persistence. Our analysis shows that the features used in these areas have a lot in common: they ...

A video server guarantees the I/O bandwidth required for the smooth playback of a video access request once it has been admitted into the system. To ensure that new video access requests will not jeopardize the bandwidth guarantees promised to existing streams, an admission control module that decides whether a new request should be granted based on the resource usage is essential in the design...

Multiple independent streams of random numbers are often required in simulation studies, for instance, to facilitate synchronization for variance-reduction purposes, and for making independent replications. A portable set of software utilities is described for uniform randomnumber generation. It provides for multiple generators (streams) running simultaneously, and each generator (stream) has i...

Non-native fish species have been implicated in native fish extinction and endangerment in the United States. Access to standardized data from across the American West allowed the opportunity to study the distribution and abundance of native and non-native fish species at a scale that has rarely been approached previously. Nonnative fishes comprise 1 of every 4 individual fish in the West and a...

Synchronization plays an important role in multimedia systems at various levels of abstraction. In this paper, we propose a set of powerful abstractions for controlling and synchronizing continuous media streams in distributed environments. The proposed abstractions are based on a very general computation model, which allows media streams to be processed (i.e. produced, consumed or transformed)...

Broadcasting popular media to clients is the ultimate scalable solution for media-ondemand. The simple solution of downloading and viewing the medium from one channel cannot guarantee a reasonable startup delay for viewing with no interruptions. Two known techniques to reduce the delay are pre-loading and pre-buffering. In the former an initial segment of the medium is already in the client buf...

R is an excellent tool for Steps 2 and 4 and it would be quite nice if it would provide better support for Step 3 as well. This is of particular interest for investigating complex models that go beyond the standard ones that are implemented as templates in simulation software. One requirement for this purpose is to have good sources (pseudo)random numbers available in the form of multiple strea...

Recently different design tasks have been formulated as problems of encoding of symbols but restricted to use a given number of binary variables (Partial Encoding Problems). Up to now specific approaches have been developed only for one type of partial encoding problem: the Partial Input Encoding (PIE) problem and have been shown to produce better results than accommodating standard encoding al...