Browsing by Author "Robert Handfield, Committee Member"

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    Adding Coordination to the Management of High-End Storage Systems
    (2009-11-20) Zhang, Zhe; Xiaosong Ma, Committee Chair; William Stewart , Committee Co-Chair; Frank Mueller, Committee Member; Robert Handfield, Committee Member; Sudharshan Vazhkudai, Committee Member
    Today’s scientific and commercial applications rely heavily on high-end computing(HEC) facilities, including large scale datacenters, supercomputers, and so forth. In these facilities, the storage subsystems are playing an increasingly important role in the overall computing experience perceived by users. Meanwhile, it is a challenging task to provide high performance and reliability to those high-end storage systems due to their high I/O demands, large scales, and complex architectures. We observe that in addition to the well-recognized lack of I/O resources relative to computing demands in an aggregate perspective, one main challenge faced by high-end storage systems lies in the growing scale and complexity of the entire environment. Individually developed system components or algorithms often behave with isolated local optimizations, and handle concurrent user workloads without considering inter-workload relationships. The author’s Ph.D. research focuses on three novel instances of bringing adaptive coordination to the management of commercial and scientific high-end storage systems, at different levels of the HEC storage hierarchy. Firstly, on a single storage server, we present a memory cache allocation mechanism which coordinates multiple concurrent sequential access streams with different request rates. Our work is based on the interesting observation that this problem bears a strong resemblance to situations long studied in the field of supply chain management (SCM), used by used by large vendors and retailers. Furthermore, in a multi-level storage architecture, we address the problem of information distortion in uncoordinated prefetching operations on different storage caches. We develop a simple information sharing mechanism, as well as a transparent hierarchy-aware optimization component named PreFetching-Coordinator (PFC), which monitors both upper- and lower-level caches, and adjusts the aggressiveness of lower-level prefetching. Finally, we improve the data availability in an entire distributed storage system by coordinating it with the HPC job scheduler and remote data sources. We implemented the proposed techniques in real software environments, including a state-of-the-art operating system kernel, a widely used job scheduler and a popular parallel file system, as well as verified simulators. Our experimental results collected from real system experiments and simulations show that our proposed techniques can significantly improve system performance and reliability by coordinating among system components and requests.
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    Relationship Value in the Hardwood Lumber Industry in U.S.
    (2008-10-31) Gonzalez, Ronalds W.; Robert Handfield, Committee Member; Daniel Saloni, Committee Member; Sudipta Dasmohapatra, Committee Chair; Michael Kocurek, Committee Member
    This study explores the influence of relationship value in buyer’s decision making in the hardwood lumber industry in the U.S. Results indicate that purchase decisions of hardwood lumber buyers are very sensitive to product quality, relationship with buyer-supplier, overall service and price (presented in order of importance). The dimension of relationship is ranked before overall service and price but it is ranked after that product quality. This sequence indicates that relationship with supplier is important only after quality product standards have been achieved. Customer loyalty and commitment can be achieved in this price driven commodity industry. Customer loyalty and commitment are consequence of higher customer satisfaction, which in this study depends on the overall relationship value, dimension that is supported by: supplier know-how, product quality, personal interaction with supplier, and delivery performance/service. Suppliers in the hardwood lumber industry can use these findings to reinforce their relational marketing strategies. At the same time, managers need to pay more close attention and invest on these four attributes/variables to improve their buyer’s overall perception of value in their relationship. The information obtained in this study is useful at the time of assigning scarce resource in marketing programs to improve buyer’s perception. A combination of high standards in the delivery of product quality, overall service, relationship value and supplier performance result in a higher satisfaction and loyalty in business relationships with the supplier. Overall increase in perceived relationship value will most likely help improve the hardwood lumber buyer’s satisfaction with the supplier.