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Cost Accounting for Shared IT Infrastructures
Distributed client/server architectures are the technological backbone of today’s data centres. A usage-based allocation of infrastructure costs to business processes or users is often not possible as the necessary resource consumption measurements incur too much overhead. Reinhard Brandl proposes a method to derive estimates for the expected resource consumption of customer-oriented services during standard load tests. This facilitates the determination of usage-based cost allocation keys significantly. He implements the concept in a software tool kit and evaluates it successfully in a set of experiments with multi-tier database applications. In particular, he uses the determined consumption estimates as input parameters for Queuing Network Models which lead to highly accurate performance predictions. Finally, he analyzes how the method can be integrated into existing IT processes at the BMW Group.
Kristian Birkeland : The First Space Scientist
PREFACEThisscientific biography of Kristian Birkeland (1867–1917) was written to bring the story ofa Norwegian national hero to the attention ofthe English-speaking world. Birkeland’sheroic stature was established not on a field of military battle,but in the bitter cold of the Artic wilderness ashe sought to answer basic questions abouthow the Sun controlled northern lights andmag-netic storms. He was also afather of Norsk Hydro one ofNorway’s largest industries. Birkel and died before reaching the age of 50.Because Birkel and never kept adiary, documented information about his family and private life is sparse. Before he died, Olaf Devik, the last of Birke-ffland’s close friends, gave along interview and graciously transferred his personal archive to A.E. Birkeland’s 82 scientific papers and three book-length publications map the progress of his investigations. addressed this book questions that had vexed European scientists for centuries. Why do the northern lights appear overhead when the Earth’s magnetic field is disturbed? How are magnetic storms connected to disturbances on the Sun? To answer these questions Birkeland interpreted his advance laboratory simulations and daring campaigns in the Arctic wilderness in the light of Maxwell’s newly discovered laws of electricity and magnetism. Birkeland’s ideas were dismissed for decades, only to be vindicated when satellites could fly above the Earth’s atmosphere.
Atmospheric Icing of Power Networks
Atmospheric ice takes a wide range of fascinating forms, all beautiful in their own ways but many posing severe risk to the security of overhead networks for electric power, communications and other systems. This book documents the fundamentals of atmospheric icing and surveys the state of the art in eight chapters, each written by a team of experienced and internationally renowned experts.
Agent-oriented software engineering V ; 5th International workshop, AOSE 2004, New York, NY, USA, July 2004, revised selected papers
The explosive growth of application areas such as electronic commerce, ent- prise resource planning and mobile computing has profoundly and irreversibly changed our views on software systems. Nowadays, software is to be based on open architectures that continuously change and evolve to accommodate new components and meet new requirements. Software must also operate on di?- ent platforms, without recompilation, and with minimal assumptions about its operating environment and its users. Furthermore, software must be robust and ¨ autonomous, capable of serving a naive user with a minimum of overhead and interference. Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities of software systems. They o?er higher-level abstractions and mechanisms which address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coordination, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, p- ception, commitments, goals, beliefs, and intentions, all of which need conceptual modelling. On the one hand, the concrete implementation of these concepts can lead to advanced functionalities.
Advances in Mobile and Wireless Communications : Views of the 16th IST Mobile and Wireless Communication Summit
This Volume presents the most exciting results of the Mobile and Wireless Communication Summit, held 2007 in Budapest. It contains worked out contributions from all areas of wireless communications, physical layer, access methods, techniques and technologies, networks, applications and systems.
