The success of a Web service is largely dependent on its responsiveness (i.e., its availability and timeliness) in the delivery of the information its users (clients) require. A practical approach to the provision of responsive Web services, recently proposed in the literature [7], is based on introducing redundancy in the service implementation, namely by replicating the service across a numbe...

A replica exchange method is presented which requires fewer replicas and is designed to be used for large systems. In this method, dynamically scaled replicas are placed between conventional replicas at broadly spaced temperatures. The potential of the scaled replicas is linearly scaled by a dynamical variable which varies between 0 and 1. When the variable is near either end point the replica ...

Replication of the most popular objects is often used in distributed data provision systems to reduce access time and improve availability. In fact, a given replica placement scheme may have to be redefined as object popularity changes. Given two replica placement schemes X and X, the Replica Migration Problem (RMP) is to compute a schedule of replica transfers and deletions that lead from X to...

Although many approaches for architecturebased reliability estimation exist, these approaches are typically limited to certain classes or exclusively concentrate on software reliability, neglecting the influence of hardware resources, component reliability, component replica and software deployment. In this paper, a reliability estimation model based on software architecture (SA) is presented. ...

We report an approach for fabricating biomimetic surface replicas of cells with nanoscale resolution. Fixed cells serve as a template for a two-stage replica molding process. Cast from the template, the impression replica contains a reproduction of cellular topographical features indented into its surface, and cast from the impression replica, the relief replica contains a copy of these feature...

Due to high latency of the Internet, it becomes a challenge to access large and widely distributed data quickly and efficiently on data grids. Replication is a process to address this issue, by storing data in different locations to reduce access latency and improve data locality. However, because of the limited storage capacity, a good replica replacement algorithm is needed to improve the eff...