The increasing popularity of storage and server consolidation introduces new challenges for resource management. In this paper we propose a Nested QoS service model that offers multiple response time guarantees for a workload based on its burstiness. The client workload is filtered into classes based on the Service Level Objective (SLO) and scheduled to provide requests in each class a stipulat...

| The availability of low-cost hardware is enabling the development of wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs), i.e., networks of resource-constrained wireless devices that can retrieve multimedia content such as video and audio streams, still images, and scalar sensor data from the environment. In this paper, ongoing research on prototypes of multimedia sensors and their integration into t...

Due to the inevitability of chip multiprocessors and the difficulty of parallel software development, there has been widespread interest in techniques that facilitate parallel programming. Recently, there have been a number of proposals regarding hardware support for transactional programming models. A key advantage of transactional programming models over lock-based synchronization is that two...

Buffered crossbar switches are special crossbar switches with each crosspoint equipped with a small exclusive buffer. The crosspoint buffers decouple input ports and output ports, and simplify switch scheduling. In this paper, we propose a scheduling algorithm called Fair and Localized Asynchronous Packet Scheduling (FLAPS) for buffered crossbar switches, to provide tight performance guarantees...

Research efforts in urban search and rescue robotics have grown substantially in recent years. Two important robotic competitions (a robot physical league and a high-level infrastructure simulation league) were established in 2001 under the RoboCup umbrella to foster collaboration amongst institutions and to provide benchmark test environments for system evaluation. While these leagues play val...

This article describes how a group of Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners were guided through the practice of writing their first academic essays in English. The method applied the principle of scaffolding to the essay writing process by providing flexible support for the learners during the writ- ing their first essays. Scaffolding included a number of aspects, each of which is explained i...

In this paper, we present a new iterative method with order of convergence eighth for solving nonlinear equations. Periteration this method requires three evaluations of the function and one evaluation of its first derivative. A general error analysis providing the eighth order of convergence is given. Several numerical examples are given to illustrate the efficiency and performance of the new ...

in customer relationship management (crm) systems, importance and performance of the attributes that define a service is very important. importance-performance analysis is an effective tool for prioritizing service attributes based on customer needs and expectations and also for identifying strengths and weaknesses of organization in the market. in this study with the purpose of increasing reli...