The delivery of IS services is very resource consuming in all organizations. In an era in which management optimization is one of the bases for competitive advantage, sourcing options must be judged carefully. Traditionally, the dilemma has been considered in terms of make (insourcing) or buy (outsourcing). But both of these options have shown a certain amount of problems. Although outsourcing ...

Fair scheduling and buffer management are two typical approaches to provide differentiated service. Fair scheduling algorithms usually need to keep a separate queue and maintain associated state variables for each incoming flow, which make them difficult to operate and scale. On the contrary, buffer management (in conjunction with FIFO scheduling) needs only a constant amount of state informati...

Identifying all the surfaces projecting into a pixel has several important applications in Computer Graphics, such as transparency and CSG. These applications further require ordering, in each pixel, the surfaces by their distance to the viewer. In real-time rendering engines, this is often achieved by recording sorted lists of the fragments produced by the rasterization pipeline. The major cha...

Buffer insertion is a popular technique to reduce the interconnect delay. The classic buffer insertion algorithm of van Ginneken has time complexity , where is the number of buffer positions. Lillis, Cheng and Lin extended van Ginneken’s algorithm to allow buffer types in time . For modern design libraries that contain hundreds of buffers, it is a serious challenge to balance the speed and perf...

Ray-tracing is one of the most researched areas in 3D photo-realistic image synthesis. We propose the T-BUFFER algorithm, which is a modification to the conventional ray-tracing algorithm and compares very favorably with it in terms of performance, which is achieved primarily through reduction in the number of unsuccessful intersection tests. Our major contribution is the integration of a shado...