Large-scale web search engines are composed of multiple data centers that are geographically distant to each other. Typically, a user query is processed in a data center that is geographically close to the origin of the query, over a replica of the entire web index. Compared to a centralized, single-center search engine, this architecture offers lower query response times as the network latenci...

Coordinating software tasks across geographic locations is difficult because of factors like: limited opportunities for interaction, lack of contextual references, and leaner communication media. Team cognition research suggests that team knowledge helps members coordinate because they can anticipate task issues more accurately, communicate more efficiently and find expertise within the team, a...

Nowadays cloud infrastructures allow storing and processing increasing amounts of scientific data. However, most of the existing large scale data management frameworks are based on the assumption that users deploy their data-intensive applications in single data center, few of them focus on the inter data centers data flows. Managing data across geographically distributed data centers is not tr...

While prior research has found that familiarity is beneficial to team performance, it is not clear whether different kinds of familiarity are more or less beneficial when the work has different types of complexity. In this paper, we theorize how task and team familiarity interact with task and team coordination complexity to influence team performance. We posit that task familiarity is more ben...

In this paper an international overview is provided about the main methods and computational tools available for the development of seismic damage scenarios and for the assessment of the ensuing loss of functionality of selected geographically distributed lifelines, namely transportation networks, electric power systems and potable water systems. The final objective of the study is to provide t...

For the purposes of analysis the outsourcing process can be divided into three specific phases: Decision, Transition and Operation. Transition involves changing the outsourcing environment and in this case we consider it to be related to ‘Changing Software Vendors’ and ‘Changing Software Systems’. The proposed research aims to specifically address gaps associated with limited research into the ...

With ever increasing Web traac, a distributed multi-server Web site can provide scalability and ex-ibility to cope with growing client demands. Load balancing algorithms to spread the requests across multiple Web servers are crucial to achieve the scalability. Various domain name server (DNS) based schedulers have been proposed in the literature, mainly for multiple homogeneous servers. The pre...

Many university sites are geographically distributed, with more than one installation or campus at which their students can study. While this is true of university systems, such as the State University of New York, the University of Wisconsin, the California state universities, to name just a few, there are individual universities that maintain more than one campus. Some of these campuses are t...

New technological advancements in synchrotron light sources enable data acquisitions at unprecedented levels. This emergent trend affects not only the size of the generated data but also the need for larger computational resources. Although beamline scientists and users have access to local computational resources, these are typically limited and can result in extended execution times. Applicat...

We present a software system for the management of geographically distributed highperformance computers. It consists of three components: 1. The Computing Center Software (CCS) is a vendor-independent resource management software for local HPC systems. It controls the mapping and scheduling of interactive and batch jobs on massively parallel systems; 2. The Resource and Service Description (RSD...