Passive internally-sensed network tomography is the study of network characteristics and behavior based on observations of network traffic on a select subset of links inside the network. In this research, we identify the Subnet Discovery Problem as a key challenge in performing passive network tomography, and propose an alternating classification ...

Two recent advances have resulted in significant improvements in web server quality-of-service. First, both centralized and distributed web servers can provide isolation among service classes by fairly distributing system resources. Second, session admission control can protect classes from performance degradation due to overload. The goal of this ...

This thesis describes Connexions, a powerful new architecture for managing web-based educational materials. Connexions, consisting of five components, enables course instructors to take advantage of the cross-linked nature of the Web and helps students visualize the relationships between concepts. The first component is a pool of interlinked content ...

The OpenMP Application Programming Interface (API) is an emerging standard for parallel programming on shared memory architectures. Networks of workstations (NOWs) are attractive parallel programming platforms because of their good price/performance ratio, as well as their flexibility and their potential to scale. This work is the first to extend the ...

Internet video streaming places new demands on source coding and network transport algorithms. The challenge is to deliver compressed video packets before their play-out deadline, despite of varying throughput, packet delay, and loss. This problem has to be solved in a way that simultaneously maximizes the video quality at the streaming client, meets ...

The growing popularity of hosted storage services and shared storage infrastructure in data centers is driving the recent interest in resource management and QoS in storage systems. The bursty nature of storage workloads raises significant performance and provisioning challenges, leading to increased resource requirements, management costs, and energy ...

As network link speeds race to 10 Gigabit/sec and beyond, Internet servers will rely on programmable network interface cards (NICs) to relieve the ever increasing frame processing burdens. To meet that need, this work introduces a scalable, programmable NIC architecture that saturates a full-duplex 10 Gigabit/sec Ethernet link. This proposed architecture ...

For many users, the perceived speed of computing is increasingly dependent on the performance of network server systems, underscoring the need for high performance servers. Cost-effective scalable network servers can be built on clusters of commodity components (PCs and LANs) instead of using expensive multiprocessor systems. However, network servers ...

This thesis deals with the application of reinforcement learning techniques to the control of a closed life support system simulator, such as could be used on a long duration space mission. We apply reinforcement learning to two different aspects of the simulator, control of recycling subsystems, and control of crop planting schedules. Comparisons ...

Many organizations have chosen to host Internet applications at Internet Data Centers (IDCs) located near network access points of the Internet to take advantage of their high availability, large network bandwidths and low network latencies. Current IDCs provide for a dedicated and static allocation of resources to each hosted application. Unfortunately, ...