Web services’ (WS) emphasis on open standards provides substantial benefits over previous application integration techniques. A major WS feature is SOAP, a simple, robust and extensible XML-based protocol for the exchange of messages. For this reason, SOAP WS on virtual hosts are now widely used to provide shared functionalities on clouds. Unfortunately, SOAP has two major performance-related d...

The ongoing convergence of grid computing and web services has inspired a number of studies on the use of SOAP-based web services for scientific computing. These studies have exposed several performance problems in using SOAP-based communication; to eliminate these bottlenecks, extensions to the SOAP standard and sophisticated implementation strategies have been proposed. In this paper, we will...

BACKGROUND We analyzed data from the baseline assessment of a large intervention project to describe typical handwashing practices in rural Bangladesh, and compare measures of hand cleanliness with household characteristics. METHODS We randomly selected 100 villages from 36 districts in rural Bangladesh. Field workers identified 17 eligible households per village using systematic sampling. Fi...

Most of previous studies on automatic database partitioning focus on deriving a (near-)optimal (re)partition scheme according to a specific pair of database and query workload and oversees the problem about how to efficiently deploy the derived partition scheme into the underlying database system. In fact, (re)partition scheme deployment is often non-trivial and challenging, especially in a dis...