The term ‘bottleneck’ has been extensively used in operations management literature. Management paradigms like the Theory of Constraints focus on the identification and exploitation of bottlenecks. Yet, we show that the term has not been rigorously defined. We provide a classification of bottleneck definitions available in literature and discuss several myths associated with the concept of bott...

The staged architecture has emerged as an approach to implement highly concurrent Internet services. Staging means that the functionality of the server code is broken down into computational stages with each stage performs some aspect of request processing. A client request would then be processed along a pipeline of these stages. This architecture allows services to behave well and gracefully ...

Susceptibility to bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is multi-factorial and is influenced by stress in conjunction with infection by both bacterial and viral pathogens. While vaccination is broadly used in an effort to prevent BRD, it is far from being fully protective and cases diagnosed from a combination of observed clinical signs without any attempt at identifying the causal pathogens are usu...

In this study, we determined the prevalence of bovine respiratory disease (BRD)-associated viral and bacterial pathogens in cattle and characterized the genetic profiles, antimicrobial susceptibilities, and nature of antimicrobial resistance determinants in collected bacteria. Nasopharyngeal swab and lung tissue samples from 68 BRD mortalities in Alberta, Canada (n = 42), Texas (n = 6), and Neb...

Python egg brooding typifies parental care because it consists of multiple behaviours that provide for multiple developmental needs. For example, tightly coiling around the eggs benefits embryonic water balance, but periodic female postural adjustments improve embryonic gas exchange. Regardless of these postural adjustments, egg brooding creates a hypoxic intra-clutch environment that constrain...

Regulatory mechanisms underlying γH2AX induction and the associated cell fate decision during DNA damage response (DDR) remain obscure. Here, we discover a bromodomain (BRD)-like module in DNA-PKcs (DNA-PKcs-BRD) that specifically recognizes H2AX acetyl-lysine 5 (K5ac) for sequential induction of γH2AX and concurrent cell fate decision(s). First, top-down mass spectrometry of radiation-phenotyp...

We describe an application of belief networks to the diagnosis of bottlenecks in computer systems. The technique relies on a high­ level functional model of the interaction be­ tween application workloads, the Windows NT operating system, and system hardware. Given a workload description, the model pre­ dicts the values of observable system counters available from the Windows NT performance mon...

In this paper, we model a research-and-development project as consisting of several modules, with each module containing one or more activities. We examine how to schedule the activities of such a project in order to maximize the expected profit when the activities have a probability of failure and when an activity’s failure can cause its module and thereby the overall project to fail. A module...

We present a new mechanism for detecting shared bottlenecks between end-to-end paths in a network. Our mechanism, which only needs one-way delays from endpoints as an input, is based on the well known linear algebraic approach SVD (Singular Value Decomposition). Clusters of flows which share a bottleneck are extracted from SVD results by applying an outlier detection method. Simulations with va...

In a middleware environment, various types of transactions are processed simultaneously. In such an environment, it is very important to know the amount of resources necessary for processing each type of transaction. Such data can be used both for resource planning and bottleneck identification. This report proposes a new approach to estimate the per-transaction-type resource consumption in a r...