In this paper we investigate optimal points of time for task assignment in dynamic load balancing schemes. Normally final assignment of tasks to server queues is made at the latest possible time. The main reason for a late assignment is, that a dynamic load balancer can use most recent information about system and application state for the decision. In general however, assignment can be done at...

We consider the problem of task assignment in a distributed system (such as a distributed Web server) in which task sizes are drawn from a heavy-tailed distribution. Many task assignment algorithms are based on the heuristic that balancing the load at the server hosts will result in optimal performance. We show this conventional wisdom is less true when the task size distribution is heavy-taile...

A new platform, termed spatial crowdsourcing (SC), is emerging that enables a requester to commission workers to physically travel to some specified locations to perform a set of spatial tasks (i.e., tasks related to a geographical location and time). For spatial crowdsourcing to scale to millions of workers and tasks, it should be able to efficiently assign tasks to workers, which in turn cons...

Metagenome sequencing is becoming common and there is an increasing need for easily accessible tools for data analysis. An essential step is the taxonomic classification of sequence fragments. We describe a web server for the taxonomic assignment of metagenome sequences with PhyloPythiaS. PhyloPythiaS is a fast and accurate sequence composition-based classifier that utilizes the hierarchical re...

We focus on a setting where users of a real-time networked application need to be assigned to servers, e.g., assignment of hosts to Internet gateways in a wireless mesh network (WMN). The service delay experienced by a user is a sum of the network-incurred delay, which depends on its network distance from the server, and a server-incurred delay, stemming from the load on the server. We introduc...

DISULFIND is a server for predicting the disulfide bonding state of cysteines and their disulfide connectivity starting from sequence alone. Optionally, disulfide connectivity can be predicted from sequence and a bonding state assignment given as input. The output is a simple visualization of the assigned bonding state (with confidence degrees) and the most likely connectivity patterns. The ser...

For a system of nite queues, we study how servers should be assigned dynamically to stations in order to obtain optimal (or near-optimal) long-run average throughput. We assume that travel times between di erent service facilities are negligible, that each server can only work on one job at a time, and that several servers can work together on one job. We show that when the service rates depend...