Showing papers on "Resource management published in 2002"

Strategy and Human Resource Management

Abstract: Human Resource Management and Business Performance - PART I: CONNECTING STRATEGY AND HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT - Strategy and the Process of Strategic Management - Strategic HRM: 'best fit' or 'best practice'? - Strategic HRM and the Resource-Based View of the Firm - PART II: MANAGING PEOPLE: SEARCHING FOR GENERAL PRINCIPLES - Work Systems and the Changing Priorities of Production - Linking Work Systems and Models of Employment - Managing Individual Performance and Development - Managing Employee Voice in Unionised and Non-Unionised Firms - PART III: MANAGING PEOPLE IN DYNAMIC AND COMPLEX BUSINESS CONTEXTS - Human Resource Strategy and the Dynamics of Industry-based Competition - Corporate Human Resource Strategy in the Global Economy - Conclusion: Implications for the Strategic Management Process - Bibliography - Author index - Subject index

GridSim: a toolkit for the modeling and simulation of distributed resource management and scheduling for Grid computing

Abstract: SUMMARY Clusters, Grids, and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have emerged as popular paradigms for next generation parallel and distributed computing. They enable aggregation of distributed resources for solving largescale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. In Grid and P2P computing environments, the resources are usually geographically distributed in multiple administrative domains, managed and owned by different organizations with different policies, and interconnected by wide-area networks or the Internet. This introduces a number of resource management and application scheduling challenges in the domain of security, resource and policy heterogeneity, fault tolerance, continuously changing resource conditions, and politics. The resource management and scheduling systems for Grid computing need to manage resources and application execution depending on either resource consumers’ or owners’ requirements, and continuously adapt to changes in resource availability. The management of resources and scheduling of applications in such large-scale distributed systems is a complex undertaking. In order to prove the effectiveness of resource brokers and associated scheduling algorithms, their performance needs to be evaluated under different scenarios such as varying number of resources and users with different requirements. In a Grid environment, it is hard and even impossible to perform scheduler performance evaluation in a repeatable and controllable manner as resources and users are distributed across multiple organizations with their own policies. To overcome this limitation, we have developed a Java-based discrete-event Grid simulation toolkit called GridSim. The toolkit supports modeling and simulation of heterogeneous Grid resources (both time- and space-shared), users and application models. It provides primitives for creation of application tasks, mapping of tasks to resources, and their management. To demonstrate suitability of the GridSim toolkit, we have simulated a Nimrod-G

A taxonomy and survey of grid resource management systems for distributed computing

Abstract: The resource management system is the central component of distributed network computing systems. There have been many projects focused on network computing that have designed and implemented resource management systems with a variety of architectures and services. In this paper, an abstract model and a comprehensive taxonomy for describing resource management architectures is developed. The taxonomy is used to identify approaches followed in the implementation of existing resource management systems for very large-scale network computing systems known as Grids. The taxonomy and the survey results are used to identify architectural approaches and issues that have not been fully explored in the research. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Economic models for resource management and scheduling in Grid computing

Abstract: The accelerated development in peer-to-peer and Grid computing has positioned them as promising next-generation computing platforms. They enable the creation of virtual enterprises for sharing resources distributed across the world. However, resource management, application development and usage models in these environments is a complex undertaking. This is due to the geographic distribution of resources that are owned by different organizations or peers. The resource owners of each of these resources have different usage or access policies and cost models, and varying loads and availability. In order to address complex resource management issues, we have proposed a computational economy framework for resource allocation and for regulating supply and demand in Grid computing environments. This framework provides mechanisms for optimizing resource provider and consumer objective functions through trading and brokering services. In a real world market, there exist various economic models for setting the price of services based on supply-and-demand and their value to the user. They include commodity market, posted price, tender and auction models. In this paper, we discuss the use of these models for interaction between Grid components to decide resource service value, and the necessary infrastructure to realize each model. In addition to usual services offered by Grid computing systems, we need an infrastructure to support interaction protocols, allocation mechanisms, currency, secure banking and enforcement services. We briefly discuss existing technologies that provide some of these services and show their usage in developing the Nimrod-G grid resource broker. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of some of the economic models in resource trading and scheduling using the Nimrod/G resource broker, with deadline and cost constrained scheduling for two different optimization strategies, on the World-Wide Grid testbed that has resources distributed across five continents.

A resource-based view of manufacturing strategy and the relationship to manufacturing performance

Abstract: This paper examines manufacturing strategy from the perspective of the resource-based view of the firm. It explores the role of resources and capabilities in manufacturing plants that cannot be easily duplicated, and for which ready substitutes are not available. Such resources and capabilities are formed by employees' internal learning based on cross-training and suggestion systems, external learning from customers and suppliers, and proprietary processes and equipment developed by the firm. Based on data from 164 manufacturing plants, the paper empirically demonstrates that competitive advantage in manufacturing (as measured by superior plant performance) results from proprietary processes and equipment which, in turn, is driven by external and internal learning. The implication is that resources such as standard equipment and employees with generic skills obtainable in factor markets are not as effective in achieving high levels of plant performance, since they are freely available to competitors. The paper also demonstrates the important role of internal and external learning in developing resources that are imperfectly imitable and difficult to duplicate. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Systems and methods for managing resource utilization in information management environments

Abstract: Resource usage accounting may be implemented in information management environments using resource utilization values. Resource usage accounting may be employed, for example, to make possible run-time enforcement of system operations on one or more subsystems or processing engines of an information management system, such as a content delivery system, for example, to advantageously provide intelligent admission control in a distributed environment. In one embodiment, resource usage accounting may be implemented to make possible the management of system resources on a per subsystem or processing engine basis, for example, based on at least two types of resource utilization indicative information: 1) resource usage that has been tracked internally throughout the life span of the overload and policy finite state machine module; and 2) resource status messages received directly or indirectly from one or more subsystems or processing engines.

A community authorization service for group collaboration

Abstract: In "grids" and "collaboratories", we find distributed communities of resource providers and resource consumers, within which often complex and dynamic policies govern who can use which resources for which purpose. We propose a new approach to the representation, maintenance and enforcement of such policies that provides a scalable mechanism for specifying and enforcing these policies. Our approach allows resource providers to delegate some of the authority for maintaining fine-grained access control policies to communities, while still maintaining ultimate control over their resources. We also describe a prototype implementation of this approach and an application in a data management context.

Systems and methods for resource utilization analysis in information management environments

Abstract: Logging and analysis of resource utilization information may be implemented, for example, to achieve intelligent capacity management of information management system resources. In one implementation, resource utilization information may be collected from one or more subsystems or processing engines of an information management system, and analyzed to gain insights into system performance. System capacity management may be implemented using collected resource utilization information, for example, to achieve dynamic management of system resources.

Economic-based Distributed Resource Management and Scheduling for Grid Computing

Abstract: Computational Grids, emerging as an infrastructure for next generation computing, enable the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed resources for solving large-scale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. As the resources in the Grid are heterogeneous and geographically distributed with varying availability and a variety of usage and cost policies for diverse users at different times and, priorities as well as goals that vary with time. The management of resources and application scheduling in such a large and distributed environment is a complex task. This thesis proposes a distributed computational economy as an effective metaphor for the management of resources and application scheduling. It proposes an architectural framework that supports resource trading and quality of services based scheduling. It enables the regulation of supply and demand for resources and provides an incentive for resource owners for participating in the Grid and motives the users to trade-off between the deadline, budget, and the required level of quality of service. The thesis demonstrates the capability of economic-based systems for peer-to-peer distributed computing by developing users' quality-of-service requirements driven scheduling strategies and algorithms. It demonstrates their effectiveness by performing scheduling experiments on the World-Wide Grid for solving parameter sweep applications.

Policy Instruments for Environmental and Natural Resource Management

Abstract: As Thomas Sterner points out, the economic 'toolkit' for dealing with environmental problems has become formidable. It includes taxes, charges, permits, deposit-refund systems, labeling, and other information disclosure mechanisms. Though not all these devices are widely used, empirical application has started within some sectors, and we are beginning to see the first systematic efforts at an advanced policy design that takes due account of market-based incentives. Sterner‘s book encourages more widespread and careful use of economic policy instruments. Intended primarily for application in developing and transitional countries, the book compares the accumulated experiences of the use of economic policy instruments in the U.S. and Europe, as well as in select rich and poor countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ambitious in scope, the book discusses the design of instruments that can be employed in a wide range of contexts, including transportation, industrial pollution, water pricing, waste, fisheries, forests, and agriculture. Policy Instruments for Environmental and Natural Resource Management is deeply rooted in economics but also informed by perspectives drawn from political, legal, ecological, and psychological research. Sterner notes that, in addition to meeting requirements for efficiency, the selection and design of policy instruments must satisfy criteria involving equity and political acceptability. He is careful to distinguish between the well-designed plans of policymakers and the resulting behavior of society. A copublication of Resources for the Future, the World Bank, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).

Managing human resources toward achieving knowledge management

Abstract: This research examines the linkages between human resource management and knowledge management. Specifically, the association between four areas of human resource management (training, decision‐making, performance appraisal, and compensation and reward) with the five areas of knowledge management (knowledge acquisition, knowledge documentation, knowledge transfer, knowledge creation, knowledge application) is explored. The statistical results suggest that a knowledge organisation requires a different management approach than the non‐knowledge organisation. Hence, the role of human resource management is also unique. In terms of employee development, the focus should be placed on achieving quality, creativity, leadership, and problem solving skill. The design of a compensation and reward system should be on promoting group performance, knowledge sharing, and innovative thinking. The performance appraisal must be the base of evaluation of employee’s knowledge management practices, and an input for directing...

The Renaissance of Community-Based Marine Resource Management in Oceania

Abstract: ■ Abstract Twenty-five years ago, the centuries-old Pacific Island practice of community-based marine resource management (CBMRM) was in decline, the victim of various impacts of westernization. During the past two decades, however, this decline has reversed in various island countries. Today CBMRM continues to grow, refuting the claim that traditional non-Western attitudes toward nature cannot provide a sound foundation for contemporary natural resource management. Limited entry, marine protected areas, closed areas, closed seasons, and restrictions on damaging or overly efficient fishing methods are some of the methods being used. Factors contributing to the upsurge include a growing perception of scarcity, the restrengthening of traditional village-based authority, and marine tenure by means of legal recognition and government support, better conservation education, and increasingly effective assistance, and advice from regional and national governments and NGOs. Today’s CBMRM is thus a form of cooperative management, but one in which the community still makes and acts upon most of the management decisions.

Institutional change in large law firms: a resource dependency and institutional perspective

Abstract: We integrate resource dependency and institutional theory to argue that resource scarcity drives, and legitimacy enables, institutional change. Building on a historical account, we examine the sources and timing of innovation departing from standard human resource practices using event history analysis of over 200 principal offices of large law firms. Offices with human resource scarcity innovated to acquire alternative resources; highly prestigious offices had the legitimacy to be first or early adopters. Our findings highlight the value of looking to the resource side and to the notion of legitimacy in building an institutional theory of change.

Towards sustainability in the water sector – The importance of human actors and processes of social learning

Abstract: Current regimes in resource management are often unsustainable as judged by ecological, economic and social criteria. Many technological resource management regimes are inflexible and not built to adapt to changes in environmental, economic or social circumstances. This inflexibility poses problems in a world characterized by fast change. The water sector is currently undergoing major processes of transformation at local, regional and global scales. Today's situation is challenged by uncertainties, e.g., in water demand (diminishing in industrialized countries, rising in developing countries), by worsening water quality, by pressure for cost-efficient solutions, and by fast changing socio-economic boundary conditions. One expects additional uncertainties, due to climate change, such as a shift in the pattern of extreme events. Hence, new strategies and institutional arrangements are required to cope with risk and change in general. When one considers processes of transformation and change, the human dimension is of particular importance. Institutions and rule systems may cause resistance to change but can also enable and facilitate necessary transformation processes. This paper explores conceptual approaches in social learning and adaptive management. It introduces agent-based modelling, and the link between analytical modelling and participatory approaches as promising new developments to explore and foster changes towards sustainability and the required transformations in technological regimes and institutional settings.

A computational economy for grid computing and its implementation in the Nimrod-G resource broker

Abstract: Computational grids that couple geographically distributed resources such as PCs, workstations, clusters, and scientific instruments, have emerged as a next generation computing platform for solving large-scale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. However, application development, resource management, and scheduling in these environments continue to be a complex undertaking. In this article, we discuss our efforts in developing a resource management system for scheduling computations on resources distributed across the world with varying quality of service (QoS). Our service-oriented grid computing system called Nimrod-G manages all operations associated with remote execution including resource discovery, trading, scheduling based on economic principles and a user-defined QoS requirement. The Nimrod-G resource broker is implemented by leveraging existing technologies such as Globus, and provides new services that are essential for constructing industrial-strength grids. We present the results of experiments using the Nimrod-G resource broker for scheduling parametric computations on the World Wide Grid (WWG) resources that span five continents.

ECOSystem: managing energy as a first class operating system resource

Abstract: Energy consumption has recently been widely recognized as a major challenge of computer systems design. This paper explores how to support energy as a first-class operating system resource. Energy, because of its global system nature, presents challenges beyond those of conventional resource management. To meet these challenges we propose the Currentcy Model that unifies energy accounting over diverse hardware components and enables fair allocation of available energy among applications. Our particular goal is to extend battery lifetime by limiting the average discharge rate and to share this limited resource among competing task according to user preferences. To demonstrate how our framework supports explicit control over the battery resource we implemented ECOSystem, a modified Linux, that incorporates our currentcy model. Experimental results show that ECOSystem accurately accounts for the energy consumed by asynchronous device operation, can achieve a target battery lifetime, and proportionally shares the limited energy resource among competing tasks.

SNAP: A Protocol for Negotiating Service Level Agreements and Coordinating Resource Management in Distributed Systems

Abstract: A fundamental problem in distributed computing is to map activities such as computation or data transfer onto resources that meet requirements for performance, cost, security, or other quality of service metrics. The creation of such mappings requires negotiation among application and resources to discover, reserve, acquire, configure, and monitor resources. Current resource management approaches tend to specialize for specific resource classes, and address coordination across resources only in a limited fashion. We present a new approach that overcomes these difficulties.We define a resource management model that distinguishes three kinds of resource-independent service level agreements (SLAs), formalizingag reements to deliver capability, perform activities, and bind activities to capabilities, respectively. We also define a Service Negotiation and Acquisition Protocol (SNAP) that supports reliable management of remote SLAs. Finally, we explain how SNAP can be deployed within the context of the Globus Toolkit.

The role of non‐technical skills in anaesthesia: a review of current literature

Abstract: level Solving problems by reasoning Uses mental resources to create mental model of problem and to work out solution from ®rst principles Supervisor level Supervisory control Allocates attention and mental resources Resource management level Resource management Uses available resources, information, equipment and personnel to manage perioperative care of patient Fletcher et al.

Anthill: a framework for the development of agent-based peer-to-peer systems

Abstract: Recent peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are characterized by decentralized control, large scale and extreme dynamism of their operating environment. As such, they can be seen as instances of complex adaptive systems (CAS) typically found in biological and social sciences. We describe Anthill, a framework to support the design, implementation and evaluation of P2P applications based on ideas such as multi-agent and evolutionary programming borrowed from CAS. An Anthill system consists of a dynamic network of peer nodes; societies of adaptive agents travel through this network, interacting with nodes and cooperating with other agents in order to solve complex problems. Anthill can be used to construct different classes of P2P services that exhibit resilience, adaptation and self-organization properties. We also describe preliminary experiences with Anthill in implementing a file sharing application.

Devolution and community-based natural resource management: creating space for local people to participate and benefit?

Abstract: This paper draws together evidence from a number of studies on the impacts of natural resource devolution policies in several Asian and southern African countries from the perspective of local people. Devolution outcomes are assessed in terms of who has greater benefits and decision-making authority. Factors that have influenced the devolution process are also examined.

Making parks work: strategies for preserving tropical nature.

Abstract: Focusing on the success stories of creating parks and protected areas, this book gathers experiences and information from thirty leading conservationists into a guidebook of principles for effective management of protected areas.

Next-generation wireless communications concepts and technologies

Abstract: Next-generation wireless (NextG) involves the concept that the next generation of wireless communications will be a major move toward ubiquitous wireless communications systems and seamless high-quality wireless services. This article presents the concepts and technologies involved, including possible innovations in architectures, spectrum allocation, and utilization, in radio communications, networks, and services and applications. These include dynamic and adaptive systems and technologies that provide a new paradigm for spectrum assignment and management, smart resource management, dynamic and fast adaptive multilayer approaches, smart radio, and adaptive networking. Technologies involving adaptive and highly efficient modulation, coding, multiple access, media access, network organization, and networking that can provide ultraconnectivity at high data rates with effective QoS for Next Gare are also described.

Channel and quality of service adaptation for multimedia delivery over wireless networks

Abstract: A cross-layer architecture is provided for delivering multiple media streams over 3G W-CDMA channels in adaptive multimedia wireless networks. A resource management mechanism dynamically allocates resources among different media streams adapted to channel status and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. By taking the time-varying wireless transmission characteristics into account, an allocation of resources is performed based on a minimum-distortion or minimum-power criterion. Estimates of the time-varying wireless transmission conditions are made through measurements of throughput and error rate. Power and distortion minimized bit allocation schemes are used with the estimated wireless transmission conditions to for dynamically adaptations in transmissions.

INS/Twine: A Scalable Peer-to-Peer Architecture for Intentional Resource Discovery

Abstract: The decreasing cost of computing technology is speeding the deployment of abundant ubiquitouscomputation and communication. With increasingly large and dynamic computing environments comes the challenge of scalable resource discovery, where client applications search for resources (services, devices, etc.) on the network by describing some attributesof what they are looking for. This is normally achieved through directory services (also called resolvers), which store resource information and resolve queries. This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of INS/Twine, an approach to scalable intentional resource discovery, where resolvers collaborate as peers to distribute resource information and to resolve queries. Our system maps resources to resolvers by transforming descriptions into numeric keys in a manner that preserves their expressiveness, facilitates even data distribution and enables efficient query resolution. Additionally, INS/Twine handles resource and resolver dynamism by treating all data as soft-state.

Systems and methods for resource usage accounting in information management environments

Abstract: Resource usage accounting may be implemented in information management environments using resource utilization values. Resource usage accounting may be employed, for example, to make possible run-time enforcement of system operations on one or more subsystems or processing engines of an information management system, such as a content delivery system, for example, to advantageously provide intelligent admission control in a distributed environment. In one embodiment, resource usage accounting may be implemented to make possible the management of system resources on a per subsystem or processing engine basis, for example, based on at least two types of resource utilization indicative information: 1) resource usage that has been tracked internally throughout the life span of the overload and policy finite state machine module; and 2) resource status messages received directly or indirectly from one or more subsystems or processing engines.

Design and evaluation of a resource selection framework for Grid applications

Abstract: While distributed, heterogeneous collections of computers ("Grids") can in principle be used as a computing platform, in practice the problems of first discovering and then organizing resources to meet application requirements are difficult. We present a general-purpose resource selection framework that addresses these problems by defining a resource selection service for locating Grid resources that match application requirements. At the heart of this framework is a simple, but powerful, declarative language based on a technique called set matching, which extends the Condor matchmaking framework to support both single-resource and multiple-resource selection. This framework also provides an open interface for loading application-specific mapping modules to personalize the resource selector. We present results obtained when this framework is applied in the context of a computational astrophysics application, Cactus. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique.

A peer-to-peer approach to resource location in grid environments

Abstract: Computational grids provide mechanisms for sharing and accessing large and heterogeneous collections of remote resources such as computers, online instruments, storage space, data, and applications. Resources are requested by specifying a set of desired attributes. Resource attributes have various degrees of dynamism, from mostly static attributes, such as operating system version, to highly dynamic ones, such as available network bandwidth or CPU load. Another dimension of dynamism is introduced by variable and highly diverse sharing policies: resources are made available to the grid community based on locally defined and potentially changing policies.