15479420
IS/IT Investment Evaluation and Benefits Realization Issues in Australia
Information systems/information technology represents substantial financial investment for many organizations. It has been shown that IS/IT investments in many organizations are huge and increasing rapidly every year and yet there is still a lack of understanding of the impact of the proper IS/IT investment evaluation processes and practices in these organizations. Thus, a survey and an in-depth case study of these practices and processes in two large governmental departments with several major IS/IT projects was conducted. The key issues presented here in some detail are of interest to practitioners concerned with making decisions about project investment and realizing benefits, as well as researchers. ACM Classification: H.0 (Information Systems – General)
362708
Low-Cost RFID Identification Variation
Interests continue to grow in recent years for the adoption of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in many different areas including transportation and supply chain management. Those RFID-included objects can be targeted more efficiently by real-time tracking and instant management. However, because of the contact-less type of RFID remote retrieval, the transmission of data in the air is very vulnerable to eavesdropping or appropriation. A primary security concern surrounding RFID technology is the illicit tracking of consumer location and analyzing of their shopping habits or behavior. This paper proposes a more secure and lightweight RFID variation protection protocol which enhances the security of the transmission of information as well as the consumer privacy protection by using randomized control access and two-way identification. In addition, this protocol also improves the overall performance and lowers the cost of RFID tag without any complicated calculation.
13951248
A survey on evaluating and realizing IS/IT benefits in Taiwanese b2bec companies
A number of issues have emerged from the analysis of the data collected via a survey conducted in Taiwanese B2BEC companies. The results show relatively high usage of IS/IT investment evaluation and benefits realization methodologies, and yet, these methodologies were generally not used effectively within the responding organizations. Most of these organizations were not yet mature in terms of their IT. However, there was a clear association between level of IT maturity and both wide and effective use of methodologies for IS/IT investment evaluation and benefits management.
11960535
Performance Modeling of Grid Resource Management and Scheduling Systems
Performance evaluation of grid resource management and scheduling system is of key importance to the success of the grid. In this paper, we introduce a generalized stochastic Petri net (GSPN) model for such purpose. The model is simple with clarity and can be applied to other research issues on grid to provide them with performance evaluation capabilities.
15307682
Accommodating polymorphic data decompositions in explicitly parallel programs
Explicitly parallel programs have the potential for greater performance than their implicitly parallel counterparts. However, this benefit can be accompanied by additional programming difficulties. We address one particular problem that has implications for both scalability and portability: the need for programs do accommodate diverse data decompositions. We explain why programs with explicit communication have difficulties in handling changes in data decomposition, and we present a solution to this problem which involves the notions of derivative functions and configuration parameters. We illustrate the technique by using three different data decompositions to solve the Modified Gram-Schmidt method on four parallel machines.<<ETX>>
15949067
Security authentication of 3G-WLAN interworking
With the development of wireless Internet, the interworking of the third generation (3G) wide area wireless networks and wireless local area networks (WLAN) has become a focus of research. 3G systems have their advantages in charging management, roaming, and security facilities, and WLAN systems have the advantages of high bandwidth and low investment cost. Interworking of 3G-WLAN offers characteristics that complement each other perfectly. Several authentication protocols have been proposed to improve security. In this paper, we firstly introduce the architectures of 3G-WLAN interworking and discuss existing problems related to authentication and key agreement procedures. Then, we present two schemes by applying authentication based on EAP-TLS (extensible authentication protocol-transport layer security) and EAP-TTLS (tunneled TLS) into integrated 3G and WLAN to achieve high end-to-end security and authentication for the users. Finally, we conduct a series of performance evaluation on the energy consumption and latency of standard authentication protocols.
6216194
The implementation and evaluation of fusion and contraction in array languages
Array languages such as Fortran 90, HPF and ZPL have many benefits in simplifying array-based computations and expressing data parallelism. However, they can suffer large performance penalties because they introduce intermediate arrays---both at the source level and during the compilation process---which increase memory usage and pollute the cache. Most compilers address this problem by simply scalarizing the array language and relying on a scalar language compiler to perform loop fusion and array contraction. We instead show that there are advantages to performing a form of loop fusion and array contraction at the array level. This paper describes this approach and explains its advantages. Experimental results show that our scheme typically yields runtime improvements of greater than 20% and sometimes up to 400%. In addition, it yields superior memory use when compared against commercial compilers and exhibits comparable memory use when compared with scalar languages. We also explore the interaction between these transformations and communication optimizations.
18052662
Probabilistic analysis on mesh network fault tolerance
Mesh networks are among the most important interconnection network topologies for large multicomputer systems. Mesh networks perform poorly in tolerating faults in the view of worst-case analysis. On the other hand, such worst cases occur very rarely in realistic situations. In this paper, we study the fault tolerance of 2-D and 3-D mesh networks under a more realistic model in which each network node has an independent failure probability. We first observe that if the node failure probability is fixed, then the connectivity probability of these mesh networks can be arbitrarily small when the network size is sufficiently large. Thus, it is practically important for multicomputer system manufacture to determine the upper bound for node failure probability when the probability of network connectivity and the network size are given. We develop a novel technique to formally derive lower bounds on the connectivity probability for 2-D and 3-D mesh networks. Our study shows that these mesh networks of practical size can tolerate a large number of faulty nodes thus are reliable enough for multicomputer systems. For example, it is formally proved that as long as the node failure probability is bounded by 0.5%, a 3-D mesh network of up to a million nodes remains connected with a probability larger than 99%.