The rapid progress in mass storage technology is enabling designers to implement large databases for a variety of applications. The possible configurations of the hierarchical storage structures (HSS) are numerous and result in various tradeoffs, e.g., storage cost, throughput, initial latency, etc. A naive design might waste system resources and result in high cost. For example, one naive desi...

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Previous research on cluster-based servers has focused on homogeneous systems. However, real-life clusters are almost invariably heterogeneous in terms of the performance, capacity, and power consumption of their hardware components. In this paper, we describe a self-configuring Web server for a heterogeneous cluster. The self-configuration is guided by analytical models of throughput and power...

The provision of advanced computational services within networks is rapidly becoming both feasible and economical. We present a general approach to the problem of configuring application sessions that require intermediate processing by showing how the session configuration problem can be transformed to a conventional shortest path problem for unicast sessions or to a conventional Steiner tree p...

Based on two different but complementary cases – the ‘mixed media case’ (architectural design work) and the ’wireless call system case’ (hospital work) – we argue that taking advantage of the potential that configurable systems offer may require attention to several ‘qualities of use’. Here we provide further elaboration of the concept of configurability, which we have suggested elsewhere (Balk...

This work gives a blind beamforming strategy for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), aiming to boost the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by coordinating phase shifts across reflective elements in absence of channel information. While existing methods IRS typically first estimate channels and then optimize shifts, we propose conditional sample mean based statistical approach that explores...