Renting software applications from an application service provider is generally assumed to provide significant overall cost savings. Whether these savings benefit the customer or provide high profit margins for the provider is a priori not clear. Lock-in of customers might reduce competition and enable the service provider to charge premium prices. We investigate in this paper the strength of l...

This paper examines the scalability of the Linux 2.4.x scheduler as the load and number of CPUs increases. We show that the current scheduler design involving a single runqueue and lock can suffer from lock contention problems which limits its scalability. We present alternate designs using multiple runqueues and priority levels that can reduce lock contention while maintaining the same functio...

Frequency synthesizers are used in a large number of time division multiplexed (TDMA) and frequency hopping wireless applications where quickly attaining frequency lock is critical. A new frequency synthesizer is described which employs a scheme for reducing lock time by a factor of two using a conventional phase locked loop architecture. Faster lock is attained by shifting the loop filter’s ze...