The evaluation of parallel job schedulers hinges on two things: the use of appropriate metrics, and the use of appropriate workloads on which the scheduler can operate. We argue that the focus should be on on-line open systems, and propose that a standard workload should be used as a benchmark for schedulers. This benchmark will specify distributions of parallelism and runtime, as found by anal...

The competitive MNIST handwritten digit recognition benchmark has a long history of broken records since 1998. The most recent advancement by others dates back 8 years (error rate 0.4%). Good old on-line back-propagation for plain multi-layer perceptrons yields a very low 0.35% error rate on the MNIST handwritten digits benchmark with a single MLP and 0.31% with a committee of seven MLP. All we...

ns3 is a simulation framework for computer networks, derived from a long line of serial simulators. Recently, ns3 incorporated a parallel, distributed scheduler, which enables distributed ns3 simulation for the first time. In this paper we discuss the current implementation and some of its limitations, with an eye to exploring potential improvements. In order to gauge progress, it is essential ...

A theoretical analysis describing the dependence of the signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) on the number of pixels and the number of particles is presented for in-line digital particle holography. The validity of the theory is verified by means of numerical simulation. Based on the theory we present a practical performance benchmark for digital holographic systems. Using this benchmark we improve the p...

The evaluation of parallel job schedulers hinges on two things: the use of appropriate metrics, and the use of appropriate workloads on which the scheduler can operate. We argue that the focus should be on on-line open systems, and propose that a standard workload should be used as a benchmark for schedulers. This benchmark will specify distributions of parallelism and runtime, as found by anal...

TPC-E is the new benchmark approved by the TPC council. It is designed to exercise a brokerage firm workload, which is representative of current On-Line Transaction Processing workloads. In this paper we present DBT-5, a fair usage open-source implementation of the TPC-E benchmark. In addition to reporting about the design and implementation of the tool, experimental results from a system runni...

If we exclude the assumption of normality in return distributions, the classical risk–reward Sharpe Ratio becomes a questionable tool for ranking risky projects. In line with Sharpe thinking, a general risk–reward ratio suitable to compare skewed returns with respect to a benchmark is introduced. The index includes asymmetrical information on: (1) ‘‘good’’ volatility (above the benchmark) and ‘...

On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems constitute the kernel of the information systems used today to support the daily operations of most organizations. Although these systems comprise the best examples of complex business-critical systems, no practical way has been proposed so far to characterize the impact of faults in such systems or to compare alternative solutions concerning depend...

In this paper we propose a branch, price and remember algorithm to solve the U shaped assembly line balancing problem. Our proposed algorithm uses a column generation approach to obtain tight lower bounds. It also uses a modification of Hoffman algorithm to obtain high quality upper bounds. Memory is also used in our proposed algorithm to store generated columns to enhance the speed of column g...

Some authors argue that age-related improvements in number line estimation (NLE) performance result from changes in strategy use. More specifically, children's strategy use develops from only using the origin of the number line, to using the origin and the endpoint, to eventually also relying on the midpoint of the number line. Recently, Peeters et al. (unpublished) investigated whether the pro...