This paper describes how we applied simulation and optimization in combination to improve patient flow within the Duke Cancer Institute, a large cancer center. We first developed a discrete-event simulation model to predict patient waiting time and resource utilization throughout various parts of the center, including the outpatient clinic, radiology, the pharmacy, laboratory services, and the ...

This paper outlines some basic performance characteristics of the Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) over Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). It also discusses a few solutions to assure acceptable TCP/IP performance over ATM which are implemented by the industry the during the last couple of years. The conclusions in this paper are based on empirical TCP/IP performance tes...

The possibility of using flexible and cost-efficient commodity hardware instead of expensive custom hardware has triggered wide interest in software routers. Performance measurement and simulation are important approaches for identifying bottlenecks of such systems to predict and improve the performance. We measure the performance of software routers using current multi-core hardware architectu...

Emerging web applications demand considerable network resources and, especially in science and engineering, considerable computational resources. The use of agents can eliminate bottlenecks in both areas, provided that their methods of computation and communication are not overly restricted. WebVector is an agent system that combines a flexible communication model with URL-based agent identific...

Dynamic pricing and good level of Pareto optimality make auctions more attractive for resource allocation over other economic models. However, some auction models present drawbacks regarding the high demand of communication when applied to large-scale scenarios. In a complex Grid environment, the communication demand can become a bottleneck; that is, a number of messages need to be exchanged fo...

Multiprocessor systems should exist in the the larger context of distributed systems, allowing multiprocessor resources to be shared by those that need them. Unfortunately, typical multiprocessor resource management techniques do not scale to large networks. The Prospero Resource Manager (PRM) is a scalable resource allocation system that supports the allocation of processing resources in large...