Load sharing in cluster service provision

The factors that are driving the development and use of grids and grid computing, such as size, dynamic features, distribution and heterogeneity, are also pushing to the forefront service quality issues. These include performance, reliability and security. Although grid middleware can address some of these issues on a wider scale, it has also become imperative to ensure adequate service provision at local level. Load sharing in clusters can contribute to the provision of a high quality service, by exploiting both static and dynamic information. This paper is concerned with the presentation of a load sharing scheme, that can satisfy grid computing requirements. It follows a proactive, non preemptive and distributed approach. Load information is gathered continuously before it is needed, and a task is allocated to the most appropriate node for execution. Performance and reliability are enhanced by the decentralised nature of the scheme and the symmetric roles of the nodes. In addition, the scheme exhibits transparency characteristics that facilitate integration with the grid.

An evaluation of a community matron service from the patients’ perspective

Community matrons are a relatively new government initiative aimed at case managing people with long-term conditions to reduce the number of emergency bed days used in hospitals. Although there have been extensive evaluations of similar case management projects, to date there has been little evaluation of the community matron's role and the perceptions patients have of this new service. One of the main Government agendas for care is to deliver a high quality service driven by the needs of the service users (DH, 2000). In order to drive this agenda, care is to deliver a high quality service driven by the needs of the service users (DH, 2000). In order to drive this agenda, it is important that the views and perceptions of people on the receiving end of the services are heard, valued and appropriate actions taken. This two part evaluative report sets out to explore how people with long-term conditions perceive the impact of community matrons and the differences this new service may have had on their lives. Questionnaires were sent to 100 patients who were currently being case-managed by a community matron to evaluate the community matron service from the patients' perspective. Part two reports on patients' perceptions of the community matron role and the influences of the role on their health.

Aspects of midwifery care 3: organisation of midwifery care

This is the third in a series of six papers presenting key findings from a national study that was undertaken to investigate the role and responsibilities of midwives and to identify continuing educational need. The background to the study and the titles of the other papers in the series have been outlined in the first paper. Issues related to the way midwifery care is organized nationally are discussed in this paper. Midwives and supervisors indicated a strong commitment to providing woman-centred care in a caring and sensitive manner, often in the face of enormous structural and organizational change. This paper addresses key issues that arose for midwives and supervisors when planning and providing an optimum quality service.

Quality balancing for parallel adaptive FEM

We present a dynamic distributed load balancing algorithm for parallel, adaptive finite element simulations using preconditioned conjugate gradient solvers based on domain-decomposition. The load balancer is designed to maintain good partition aspect ratios. It can calculate a balancing flow using different versions of diffusion and a variant of breadth first search. Elements to be migrated are chosen according to a cost function aiming at the optimization of subdomain shapes. We show how to use information from the second step to guide the first. Experimental results using Bramble's preconditioner and comparisons to existing state-ot-the-art load balancers show the benefits of the construction.

Adaptive partition and hybrid method in fractal video compression

Fractal image compression is a relatively recent image compression method, which is simple to use and often leads to a high compression ratio. These advantages make it suitable for the situation of a single encoding and many decoding, as required in video on demand, archive compression, etc. There are two fundamental fractal compression methods, namely, the cube-based and the frame-based methods, being commonly studied. However, there are advantages and disadvantages in both methods. This paper gives an extension of the fundamental compression methods based on the concept of adaptive partition. Experimental results show that the algorithms based on adaptive partition may obtain a much higher compression ratio compared to algorithms based on fixed partition while maintaining the quality of decompressed images.