Interoperable Resource Brokering with Policy-based Provisioning and Job Allocation

The increasing needs for computational power in areas such as weather simulation, genomics or Internet applications have led to sharing of geographically distributed and heterogeneous resources from commercial data centers and scientific institutions. Research in the areas of utility, grid and cloud computing, together with improvements in network and hardware virtualization has resulted in methods to locate and use resources to rapidly provision virtual environments in a flexible manner, while lowering costs for consumers and providers. However, there is still a lack of methodologies to enable efficient and seamless sharing of resources among institutions. In this work, we concentrate in the problem of executing parallel scientific applications across distributed resources belonging to separate organizations. Our approach can be divided in three main points. First, we define and implement an interoperable grid protocol to distribute job workloads among partners with different middleware and execution resources. Second, we research and implement different policies for virtual resource provisioning and job-to-resource allocation, taking advantage of their cooperation to improve execution cost and performance. Third, we explore the consequences of on-demand provisioning and allocation in the problem of site-selection for the execution of parallel workloads, and propose new strategies to reduce job slowdown and overall cost.

Water Demand and Allocation in the Mara River Basin, Kenya/Tanzania in the Face of Land Use Dynamics and Climate Variability

The Mara River Basin (MRB) is endowed with pristine biodiversity, socio-cultural heritage and natural resources. The purpose of my study is to develop and apply an integrated water resource allocation framework for the MRB based on the hydrological processes, water demand and economic factors. The basin was partitioned into twelve sub-basins and the rainfall runoff processes was modeled using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) after satisfactory Nash-Sutcliff efficiency of 0.68 for calibration and 0.43 for validation at Mara Mines station. The impact and uncertainty of climate change on the hydrology of the MRB was assessed using SWAT and three scenarios of statistically downscaled outputs from twenty Global Circulation Models. Results predicted the wet season getting more wet and the dry season getting drier, with a general increasing trend of annual rainfall through 2050. Three blocks of water demand (environmental, normal and flood) were estimated from consumptive water use by human, wildlife, livestock, tourism, irrigation and industry. Water demand projections suggest human consumption is expected to surpass irrigation as the highest water demand sector by 2030. Monthly volume of water was estimated in three blocks of current minimum reliability, reserve (>95%), normal (80–95%) and flood (40%) for more than 5 months in a year. The assessment of water price and marginal productivity showed that current water use hardly responds to a change in price or productivity of water. Finally, a water allocation model was developed and applied to investigate the optimum monthly allocation among sectors and sub-basins by maximizing the use value and hydrological reliability of water. Model results demonstrated that the status on reserve and normal volumes can be improved to ‘low’ or ‘moderate’ by updating the existing reliability to meet prevailing demand. Flow volumes and rates for four scenarios of reliability were presented. Results showed that the water allocation framework can be used as comprehensive tool in the management of MRB, and possibly be extended similar watersheds.

Fast and efficient user pairing and power allocation algorithm for non-orthogonal multiple access in cellular networks

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is emerging as a promising multiple access technology for the fifth generation cellular networks to address the fast growing mobile data traffic. It applies superposition coding in transmitters, allowing simultaneous allocation of the same frequency resource to multiple intra-cell users. Successive interference cancellation is used at the receivers to cancel intra-cell interference. User pairing and power allocation (UPPA) is a key design aspect of NOMA. Existing UPPA algorithms are mainly based on exhaustive search method with extensive computation complexity, which can severely affect the NOMA performance. A fast proportional fairness (PF) scheduling based UPPA algorithm is proposed to address the problem. The novel idea is to form user pairs around the users with the highest PF metrics with pre-configured fixed power allocation. Systemlevel simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is significantly faster (seven times faster for the scenario with 20 users) with a negligible throughput loss than the existing exhaustive search algorithm.

Iowa Finance Authority Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program 2007 Qualified Allocation Plan, April 3, 2008

As the Housing Credit Agency responsible for allocating Tax Credits in the State of Iowa, IFA must adopt a written Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP). The purpose of the QAP is to set forth the criteria that IFA will use in evaluating and monitoring Projects submitted to it by the Developer/Ownership Entity for consideration in making an allocation of Tax Credits. The Governor must approve the QAP after the public has had the opportunity to comment through a public hearing.

Iowa Finance Authority Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program 2008 Qualified Allocation Plan, June 14, 2007

As the Housing Credit Agency responsible for allocating Tax Credits in the State of Iowa, IFA must adopt a written Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP). The purpose of the QAP is to set forth the criteria that IFA will use in evaluating and monitoring Projects submitted to it by the Developer/Ownership Entity for consideration in making an allocation of Tax Credits. The Governor must approve the QAP after the public has had the opportunity to comment through a public hearing.

Iowa Finance Authority Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program 2009 First Amended Qualified Allocation Plan, February 10, 2012

As the Housing Credit Agency responsible for allocating Tax Credits in the State of Iowa, IFA must adopt a written Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP). The purpose of the QAP is to set forth the criteria that IFA will use in evaluating and monitoring Projects submitted to it by the Developer/Ownership Entity for consideration in making an allocation of Tax Credits. The Governor must approve the QAP after the public has had the opportunity to comment through a public hearing.

Iowa Finance Authority Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program 2009 Second Amended Qualified Allocation Plan, October 14, 2008

As the Housing Credit Agency responsible for allocating Tax Credits in the State of Iowa, IFA must adopt a written Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP). The purpose of the QAP is to set forth the criteria that IFA will use in evaluating and monitoring Projects submitted to it by the Developer/Ownership Entity for consideration in making an allocation of Tax Credits. The Governor must approve the QAP after the public has had the opportunity to comment through a public hearing.

Iowa Finance Authority Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program 2009 Qualified Allocation Plan, July 10, 2008

As the Housing Credit Agency responsible for allocating Tax Credits in the State of Iowa, IFA must adopt a written Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP). The purpose of the QAP is to set forth the criteria that IFA will use in evaluating and monitoring Projects submitted to it by the Developer/Ownership Entity for consideration in making an allocation of Tax Credits. The Governor must approve the QAP after the public has had the opportunity to comment through a public hearing.

Iowa Finance Authority Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program 2010 Qualified Allocation Plan, July 9, 2009

As the Housing Credit Agency responsible for allocating Tax Credits in the State of Iowa, IFA must adopt a written Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP). The purpose of the QAP is to set forth the criteria that IFA will use in evaluating and monitoring Projects submitted to it by the Developer/Ownership Entity for consideration in making an allocation of Tax Credits. The Governor must approve the QAP after the public has had the opportunity to comment through a public hearing.

Iowa Finance Authority Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program 2011 Qualified Allocation Plan, November 29, 2010

As the Housing Credit Agency responsible for allocating Tax Credits in the State of Iowa, IFA must adopt a written Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP). The purpose of the QAP is to set forth the criteria that IFA will use in evaluating and monitoring Projects submitted to it by the Developer/Ownership Entity for consideration in making an allocation of Tax Credits. The Governor must approve the QAP after the public has had the opportunity to comment through a public hearing.

Iowa Finance Authority Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program 2012 Qualified Allocation Plan, December 8, 2011

As the Housing Credit Agency responsible for allocating Tax Credits in the State of Iowa, IFA must adopt a written Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP). The purpose of the QAP is to set forth the criteria that IFA will use in evaluating and monitoring Projects submitted to it by the Developer/Ownership Entity for consideration in making an allocation of Tax Credits. The Governor must approve the QAP after the public has had the opportunity to comment through a public hearing.

Iowa Finance Authority Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program 2013 Qualified Allocation Plan, October 9, 2012

As the Housing Credit Agency responsible for allocating Tax Credits in the State of Iowa, IFA must adopt a written Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP). The purpose of the QAP is to set forth the criteria that IFA will use in evaluating and monitoring Projects submitted to it by the Developer/Ownership Entity for consideration in making an allocation of Tax Credits. The Governor must approve the QAP after the public has had the opportunity to comment through a public hearing.

Iowa Finance Authority Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program 2014 Qualified Allocation Plan, October 2, 2013

As the Housing Credit Agency responsible for allocating Tax Credits in the State of Iowa, IFA must adopt a written Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP). The purpose of the QAP is to set forth the criteria that IFA will use in evaluating and monitoring Projects submitted to it by the Developer/Ownership Entity for consideration in making an allocation of Tax Credits. The Governor must approve the QAP after the public has had the opportunity to comment through a public hearing.

Iowa Finance Authority Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program 4% Qualified Allocation Plan, October 6, 2014

As the Housing Credit Agency responsible for allocating Tax Credits in the State of Iowa, IFA must adopt a written Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP). The purpose of the QAP is to set forth the criteria that IFA will use in evaluating and monitoring Projects submitted to it by the Developer/Ownership Entity for consideration in making an allocation of Tax Credits. The Governor must approve the QAP after the public has had the opportunity to comment through a public hearing.

Iowa Finance Authority Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program 4% Qualified Allocation Plan, September 7, 2016

As the Housing Credit Agency responsible for allocating Tax Credits in the State of Iowa, IFA must adopt a written Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP). The purpose of the QAP is to set forth the criteria that IFA will use in evaluating and monitoring Projects submitted to it by the Developer/Ownership Entity for consideration in making an allocation of Tax Credits. The Governor must approve the QAP after the public has had the opportunity to comment through a public hearing.