A true Video-on-Demand (VOD) system provides the ultimate flexibility in video services by allowing users to select any video programs, at any time, and to perform any VCR-like user interactions. To allow true VOD, one approach is to have a dedicated video stream for each customer. This is expensive, especially when multiple identical video streams are sent to multiple customers accessing the s...

Paxos is probably the most popular state machine replication protocol. Two optimizations that can greatly improve its performance are batching and pipelining. However, tuning these two optimizations to achieve high-throughput can be challenging, as their effectiveness depends on many parameters like the network latency and bandwidth, the speed of the nodes, and the properties of the application...

When designing steady-state computer simulation experiments, one is often faced with the choice of batching observations in one long run or replicating a number of smaller runs. Both methods are potentially useful in simulation output analysis. In its simplest form, the choice boils down to: Should we divide one long run into b adjacent, nonoverlapping batches, each of size m? Or should we cond...

An interactive video-on-demand (VoD) system allows users to access video services, such as movies, electronic encyclopedia, interactive games, and educational videos from video servers on a broadband network. This paper develops a performance evaluation tool for the system design. In particular, a user activity model is developed to describe the usage of system resources, i.e., network bandwidt...

An interactive video-on-demand (VoD) system allows users to access video services, such as movies, electronic encyclopedia, interactive games, and educational videos from video servers on a broadband network. This paper develops a performance evaluation tool for the system design. In particular, a user activity model is developed to describe the usage of system resources, i.e., network bandwidt...

We address the problem of scheduling n jobs on a batching machine to minimize regular scheduling criteria that are non-decreasing in the job completion times. A batching machine is a machine that can handle up to b jobs simultaneously. The jobs that are processed together form a batch, and all jobs in a batch start and complete at the same time. The processing time of a batch is equal to the la...

Jobs can be batched if they share the same setup times on a machine in many practical situations. Another reason for batching arises when a machine can process several jobs at the same time. On the other hand, splitting a job or lot which consists of many identical items often increases customer service and decreases throughput time. Especially in CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing) these d...

The variety of possible anonymity network topologies has spurred much debate in recent years. In a synchronous batching design, each batch of messages enters the mix network together, and the messages proceed in lockstep through the network. We show that a synchronous batching strategy can be used in various topologies, including a free-route network, in which senders choose paths freely, and a...

We propose a mini-batching scheme for improving the theoretical complexity and practical performance of semi-stochastic gradient descent applied to the problem of minimizing a strongly convex composite function represented as the sum of an average of a large number of smooth convex functions, and simple nonsmooth convex function. Our method first performs a deterministic step (computation of th...

Scheduling decisions in the diffusion and cleaning area can be crucial for the overall performance of a semiconductor manufacturing facility. This area includes complex production constraints and long processing durations. Consequently, we want to optimize scheduling decisions in this area while taking all relevant real-world constraints into account. An important property of machines in this w...