Web sites have gradually shifted from delivering just static html pages and images to customized, user-specific content and plethora of online services. The new features and facilities are made possible by dynamic content which is produced at request time. Multi-tiered database-driven web sites form the predominant infrastructure for most structured ...

Current simulators for shared-memory multiprocessor architectures involve a large tradeoff between simulation speed and accuracy. Most simulators assume much simpler processors than the current generation of processors that aggressively exploit instruction-level parallelism (ILP). This can result in large simulation inaccuracies. A few newer simulators ...

Memory copy speed is known to be a significant barrier to high-speed communication. We perform an analysis of the requirements for a copy-free buffer system, develop an implementation-independent applications programming interface (API) based on those requirements, and then implement a system that conforms to the API. In addition, we design and ...

Block memory operations are frequently performed by the operating system and consume an increasing fraction of kernel execution time. These operations include memory copies, page zeroing, interprocess communication, and networking. This thesis demonstrates that performance of these common OS operations is highly dependent on the cache state and future ...

In binary classification there are two types of errors, and in many applications these may have very different costs. We consider two learning frameworks that address this issue: minimax classification, where we seek to minimize the maximum of the false alarm and miss rates, and Neyman-Pearson (NP) classification, where we seek to minimize the miss ...

In order to curb microprocessor power consumption, we propose an L1 data cache which can be reconfigured dynamically at runtime according to the cache requirements of a given application. A two phase approach is used involving both compile time information, and the runtime monitoring of program performance. The compiler predicts L1 data cache ...

The convenience, utility value, and ease of deployment has led to an ubiquitous integration of mobile computing devices which will, in future, form mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), several orders of magnitude larger than what current protocols can handle. Safari, a scalable ad hoc networking architecture, promises to provide scalable routing and ...

Network tomography has recently emerged as a promising method for indirectly inferring network state information from end-to-end measurements. In this thesis, I present novel methodologies for several challenging network inference problems. I also tackle practical problems faced in deploying tomographic techniques in the Internet and provide practical ...

Multihop wireless mesh networks can provide Internet access over a wide area with minimal infrastructure expenditure. In this work, we investigate key issues involved in deploying such networks including individual link characteristics, multihop application layer performance, and network-wide reliability and throughput. We perform extensive measurements ...