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Proxy hit ratios tend to decrease as the demand and supply of Web contents are becoming more diverse. By case studies, we quantitatively confirm this trend and observe significant document duplications among a proxy and its client browsers' caches. One reason behind this trend is that the client/server Web caching model does not support direct resource sharing among clients, causing the Web contents and the network bandwidths among clients to be relatively underutilized. To address these limits and improve Web caching performance, we have extensively enhanced and deployed our browsers-aware framework, a peer-to-peer Web caching management scheme. We make the browsers and their proxy share the contents to exploit the neglected but rich data locality in browsers and reduce document duplications among the proxy and browsers' caches to effectively utilize the Web contents and network bandwidth among clients. The objective of our scheme is to improve the scalability of proxy-based caching both in the number of connected clients and in the diversity of Web documents. In this paper, we show that building such a caching system with considerations of sharing contents among clients, minimizing document duplications, and achieving data integrity and communication anonymity is not only feasible but also highly effective. Index Term--Internet systems, peer-to-peer systems, proxy caching, browser caching, data integrity, communication anonymity.

Despite huge software engineering efforts and programming language support, resource and memory leaks are still a troublesome issue, even in memory-managed languages such as Java. Understanding the properties of leak-inducing defects, how the leaks manifest, and how they are repaired is an essential prerequisite for designing better approaches for avoidance, diagnosis, and repair of leak-related bugs. We conduct a detailed empirical study on 491 issues from 15 large open-source Java projects. The study proposes taxonomies for the leak types, for the defects causing them, and for the repair actions. We investigate, under several aspects, the distributions within each taxonomy and the relationships between them. We find that manual code inspection and manual runtime detection are still the main methods for leak detection. We find that most of the errors manifest on error-free execution paths, and developers repair the leak defects in a shorter time than non-leak defects. We also identify 13 recurring code transformations in the repair patches. Based on our findings, we draw a variety of implications on how developers can avoid, detect, isolate and repair leak-related bugs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION: Some Alzheimer's Disease (AD) patients respond to chromatic light stimulus, which may influence intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs), due to factors common to both AD and Age-Related Macular Disease (AMD). OBJECTIVES: In this study, short light pulses of three colours were introduced to a novel diagnostic procesure for AD patients such as classification techniques using waveform features of pupil light reflexs (PLRs), and their prediction performances were evaluated. METHOD: PLRs to 1s pulses of red, blue and white stimuli shown at high and low photopic levels followed by a 7s restoration process were recorded after the stimuli were shown to 7 AD patients and 12 non-AD participants (aged 42-89). Features of waveform shapes of PLRs in 5 dimensions and 15 features of PLRs were extracted. RESULTS: In a classification analysis, most non-AD participants were correctly identified using the same level of performance we reported when PLRs for red and blue stimuli were used to measure the performance of AD patients. There were significant differences in some of the features of PLRs extracted from the two groups (AD and non-AD participants), particularly with the features for blue light stimuli in high brightness, which produced significant reactions in AD patients. The classification performance of using 15 features of the response to blue light stimuli was the highest among responses for all three colours, and was higher than the performance using the procedure in the previous study. Also, a few of the features extracted using the three colours of stimuli changed significantly across age ranges (70 and under, 71-80, and over 80), so these may indicate factors related to ageing. CONCLUSION: These results confirm that some specific features of PLRs, in particular the response to blue light, can indicate the existence of AD in patients. Also, a few of the features may reveal factors related to ageing during evaluations which use PLRs. This evidence may help in the better understanding of features of PLRs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently introduced spot instances in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offer low resource costs in exchange for reduced reliability; these instances can be revoked abruptly due to price and demand fluctuations. Mechanisms and tools that deal with the cost-reliability tradeoffs under this schema are of great value for users seeking to lessen their costs while maintaining high reliability. We study how mechanisms, namely, checkpointing and migration, can be used to minimize the cost and volatility of resource provisioning. Based on the real price history of EC2 spot instances, we compare several adaptive checkpointing schemes in terms of monetary costs and improvement of job completion times. We evaluate schemes that apply predictive methods for spot prices. Furthermore, we also study how work migration can improve task completion in the midst of failures while maintaining low monetary costs. Trace-based simulations show that our schemes can reduce significantly both monetary costs and task completion times of computation on spot instance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Addresses the process of confederating multiple compute-data centers or utility data centers (UDC) to increase flexibility and utilization for business workloads. Information on the control cycle of an automated resource demand-supply control system; Features of the UDC, which was developed by Hewlett-Packard; Functions of a UDC platform; Ways in which the UDC can achieve demand-control instruments; Description of the three layers of the UDC control system. INSET: Related Work in Autonomous System Management.

No abstract received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]