In this paper, we consider the problem of modeling machine availability in enterprise-area and wide-area distributed computing settings. Using availability data gathered from three different environments, we detail the suitability of four potential statistical distributions for each data set

State-of-the-art and emerging scientific applications require fast access to large quantities of data and commensurately fast computational resources. Both resources and data are often distributed in a wide-area network with components administered locally and independently. Computations may

The difficulty of developing reliable distributed softwme is an impediment to applying distributed computing technology in many settings. Expeti _ with the Isis system suggests that a structured approach based on virtually synchronous _ groups yields systems that are substantially easier to develop

Entity authentication and key distribution are central cryptographic problems in distributed computing -- but up until now, they have lacked even a meaningful definition. One consequence is that incorrect and inefficient protocols have proliferated. This paper provides the first treatment

, as well as novel abstractions like Active Message can be implemented efficiently. A U-Net prototype on an 8-node ATM cluster of standard workstations achieves 15Mbytes/s TCP bandwidth with 1Kbyte buffers and demonstrates performance equivalent to Meiko CS-2 and TMC CM-5 supercomputers on a set of Split

Dryad is a general-purpose distributed execution engine for coarse-grain data-parallel applications. A Dryad applica-tion combines computational “vertices ” with communica-tion “channels ” to form a dataflow graph. Dryad runs the application by executing the vertices of this graph on a set

Abstract The aggregate motion of a flock of birds, a herd of land animals, or a school of fish is a beautiful and familiar part of the natural world. But this type of complex motion is rarely seen in computer animation. This paper explores an approach based on simulation as an alternative

Grid technologies enable large-scale sharing of resources within formal or informal consortia of individuals and/or institutions: what are sometimes called virtual organizations. In these settings, the discovery, characterization, and monitoring of resources, services, and computations

Recently the notion of self-similarity has been shown to apply to wide-area and local-area network traffic. In this paper we examine the mechanisms that give rise to the self-similarity of network traffic. We present a hypothesized explanation for the possible self-similarity of traffic by using a

, and furthermore are subject to attentional control. A model of attention is presented to address these issues. Within a parallel distributed processing framework, it is proposed that the attributes of automaticity depend on the strength of a processing pathway and that strength increases with train-ing