Hadoop MapReduce adopts a two-phase (map and reduce) scheme to schedule tasks among data-intensive applications. However, under this scheme, Hadoop schedulers do not work effectively for both phases. We reveal that there exists a serious fairness issue among jobs of different sizes, leading to prolonged execution for small jobs, which are starving for reduce slots held by large jobs. To solve t...

The literature often suggests that proprioceptive and especially vestibular cues are required for navigation and spatial orientation tasks involving rotations of the observer. To test this notion, we conducted a set of experiments in virtual environments in which only visual cues were provided. Participants had to execute turns, reproduce distances, or perform triangle completion tasks. Most ex...

MapReduce is by far one of themost successful realizations of large-scale data-intensive cloud computing platforms. When to start the reduce tasks is one of the key problems to advance the MapReduce performance. The existing implementationsmay result in a block of reduce tasks.When the output ofmap tasks become large, the performance of a MapReduce scheduling algorithm will be influenced seriou...

Despite the general findings that address the positive contribution of teaching pragmatic features to interlanguage pragmatic development, the question as to the most effective method is far from being resolved. Moreover, the potential of literature as a means of introducing learners into the social practices and norms of the target culture, which underlie the pragmatic competence, has not been...

In this paper we explore a new theory of discourse structure that stresses the role of purpose and processing in discourse. In this theory, discourse structure is composed of three separate but interrelated components: the structure of the sequence of utterances (called the linguistic structure), a structure of purposes (called the intentional structure), and the state of focus of attention (ca...

Real-time applications often have mixed hard and soft deadlines, can be preempted subject to the cost of context switching or the restart of computation, and have various data dependency. The simple but widely used task completion ratio, as the Quality of Service (QoS) metric, does not capture these characteristics and can not reflect user perceived QoS well. In this paper, we propose a new qua...