Context: Multi Mediation is a process of collecting data from network(s) &amp; network elements, pre-processing this data and distributing it to various systems like Big Data analysis, Billing Systems, Network Monitoring Systems, and Service Assurance etc. With the growing demand for networks and emergence of new services, data collected from networks is growing. There is need for efficiently organizing this data and this can be done using databases. Although RDBMS offers Scale-up solutions to handle voluminous data and concurrent requests, this approach is expensive. So, alternatives like distributed databases are an attractive solution. Suitable distributed database for Multi Mediation, needs to be investigated. Objectives: In this research we analyze two distributed databases in terms of performance, scalability and availability. The inter-relations between performance, scalability and availability of distributed databases are also analyzed. The distributed databases that are analyzed are MySQL Cluster 7.4.4 and Apache Cassandra 2.0.13. Performance, scalability and availability are quantified, measurements are made in the context of Multi Mediation system. Methods: The methods to carry out this research are both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative study is made for the selection of databases for evaluation. A benchmarking harness application is designed to quantitatively evaluate the performance of distributed database in the context of Multi Mediation. Several experiments are designed and performed using the benchmarking harness on the database cluster. Results: Results collected include average response time &amp; average throughput of the distributed databases in various scenarios. The average throughput &amp; average INSERT response time results favor Apache Cassandra low availability configuration. MySQL Cluster average SELECT response time is better than Apache Cassandra for greater number of client threads, in high availability and low availability configurations.Conclusions: Although Apache Cassandra outperforms MySQL Cluster, the support for transaction and ACID compliance are not to be forgotten for the selection of database. Apart from the contextual benchmarks, organizational choices, development costs, resource utilizations etc. are more influential parameters for selection of database within an organization. There is still a need for further evaluation of distributed databases. / <p>I am indebted to my advisor Prof. Lars Lundberg and his valuable ideas which helped in the completion of this work. In fact he has guided on every crucial and important stages of this research work.</p><p>I sincerely thank Prof. Markus Fiedler &amp; Prof. Kurt Tutschku for their endless support during the work.</p><p>I am grateful to Neeraj Garg, Sourab, Saket &amp; Kulbir at Ericsson, for providing me necessary equipment and helping me financially during my work.</p><p>To my family members and friends who one way or the other shared their support. Thank you.</p><p>Above all I would like to thank the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the author of everything.</p>

In recent years, cloud storage systems have become very popular due to their good scal- ability and high availability. However, these storage systems provide limited transactional capabilities, which makes developing applications that use these systems substantially more difficult than developing applications that use a traditional SQL-based relational database management systems (DBMS). There have been solutions that provide transactional SQL-based DBMS services on the cloud, including solutions that use cloud shared storage systems to store the data. However, none of these solutions take advantage of the shared cloud storage architecture to provide DBMS high availability. These solutions typically deal with the failure of a DBMS server by restarting this server and going through crash recovery based on the transaction log, which can lead to long DBMS service downtimes that are not acceptable to users. It is possible to run traditional DBMS high availability solutions in cloud environments. These solutions are typically based on shipping the transaction log from a primary server to a backup server, and replaying the log at the backup server to keep it up to date with the primary. However, these solutions do not work well if the primary and backup are in different, geographically distributed data centers due to the high latency of log shipping. Furthermore, these solutions do not take advantage of the capabilities of the underlying shared storage system. We present a new transparent high availability system for transactional SQL-based DBMS on a shared storage architecture, which we call CAC-DB (Continuous Access Cloud DataBase). Our system is especially designed for eventually consistent cloud storage systems that run efficiently in multiple geographically distributed data centers. The database and transaction logs are stored in such a storage system, and therefore remain available after a failure up to the failure of an entire data center (e.g., in a natural disaster). CAC-DB takes advantage of this shared storage to ensure that the DBMS service remains available and transactionally consistent in the face of failures up to the loss of one or more data centers. By taking advantage of shared storage, CAC-DB can run in a geographically distributed environment with minimal overhead as compared to traditional log shipping solutions. In CAC-DB, an active (primary) and a standby (backup) DBMS run on different servers in different data centers. The standby catches up with the active's memory state by replaying the shared log. When the active crashes, the standby can finish the failover process and reach peak throughput very quickly. The DBMS service only experiences several seconds of downtime. While the basic idea of replaying the log is simple and not new, the shared storage environment poses many new challenges including the need for synchronization protocols, new buffer pool management mechanisms, approaches for guaranteeing strong consistency without sacrifi cing performance and new shared storage based failure detection mechanism. This thesis solves these challenges and presents a system that achieves the following goal: if a data center fails, not only does the persistent image of the database on the storage tier survive, but also the DBMS service can resume almost uninterrupted and reach peak throughput in a very short time. At the same time, the throughput of the DBMS service in normal processing is not negatively affected. Our experiments with CAC-DB running on EC2 con rm that it can achieve the above goals.

This study is based on ethnographic research that was conducted in the villages of Santa María de Rivas and San Gerardo de Rivas in the coffee farming region of Pérez Zeledón, Costa Rica. While these two villages are in close proximity to each other, the economy of San Gerardo is based more on tourism than the economy of Santa María, although both towns still engage in agricultural activities. Within each village, I conducted 15 preliminary interviews, followed by ten follow-up interviews with the main food preparers of the households. From in depth discussions, I found that food consumption patterns of people in both towns were being affected by seasonal variations in incomes due to the cyclical nature of employment in both tourism and agriculture. A number of households from these villages were experiencing periods of food worries throughout the year that were linked to the seasonality of tourism as well as agriculture, and in particular coffee production. Seasonal availability of particular food items also shaped consumption patterns; however, perceptions of food insecurity in this context appear to be primarily related to problems of access.

No description available.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Uppsala : Univ., 2004. / Härtill 5 uppsatser.

Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of the single genotype to pruduce multiple phenotypes in response to evironmental conditions. There are many factors affecting phenotypic plasticity. The aim of this thesis is to summarize the current knowledge of phenotypic plasticity of aquatic insects with emphasis on the role of temperature and food availability. The review is complemented by a laboratory experiments designed to investigate the effect of temperature and food availability on growth and development rate of diving beetle Acilius canaliculatus (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae). The results are discussed in the light of the ecological concepts of temperature-size rule and developmental isomorphy.

Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of the single genotype to pruduce multiple phenotypes in response to evironmental conditions. There are many factors affecting phenotypic plasticity. The aim of this thesis is to summarize the current knowledge of phenotypic plasticity of aquatic insects with emphasis on the role of temperature and food availability. The review is complemented by a laboratory experiments designed to investigate the effect of temperature and food availability on growth and development rate of diving beetle Acilius canaliculatus (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae). The results are discussed in the light of the ecological concepts of temperature-size rule and developmental isomorphy.

Modern telecommunication applications must provide high availability and performance. They must also be maintainable in order to reduce the maintenance cost and time-to-market for new versions. Previous studies have shown that the ambition to build maintainable systems may result in very poor performance. Here we evaluate an application called SDP pre-paid and show that the ambition to build systems with high performance and availability can lead to a complex software design with poor maintainability. We show that more than 85% of the SDP code is due to performance and availability optimizations. By implementing a SDP prototype with an alternative architecture we show that the code size can be reduced with an order of magnitude by removing the performance and availability optimizations from the source code and instead using modern fault tolerant hardware and third party software. The performance and availability of the prototype is as least as good as the old SDP. The hardware and third party software cost is only 20-30% higher for the prototype. We also define three guidelines that help us to focus the additional hardware investments to the parts where it is really needed.

This study is based on ethnographic research that was conducted in the villages of Santa María de Rivas and San Gerardo de Rivas in the coffee farming region of Pérez Zeledón, Costa Rica. While these two villages are in close proximity to each other, the economy of San Gerardo is based more on tourism than the economy of Santa María, although both towns still engage in agricultural activities. Within each village, I conducted 15 preliminary interviews, followed by ten follow-up interviews with the main food preparers of the households. From in depth discussions, I found that food consumption patterns of people in both towns were being affected by seasonal variations in incomes due to the cyclical nature of employment in both tourism and agriculture. A number of households from these villages were experiencing periods of food worries throughout the year that were linked to the seasonality of tourism as well as agriculture, and in particular coffee production. Seasonal availability of particular food items also shaped consumption patterns; however, perceptions of food insecurity in this context appear to be primarily related to problems of access.

Orientador: Gilberto De Nucci / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Ciências Médicas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-26T23:11:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Bittencourt_SamaraFavi_M.pdf: 4331032 bytes, checksum: 1687850fe4ff2a1bcd7253f2eaecb782 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015 / Resumo: O presente estudo tem como objetivo o desenvolvimento de um método rápido, sensível e específico para quantificação de propiltiouracil em plasma humano utilizando metiltiouracil como padrão interno. O analito e o padrão interno foram extraídos do plasma por uma extração líquido-líquido utilizando um solvente orgânico, acetato de etila. Os extratos foram analisados por cromatografia líquida de alta eficiência acoplada à espectrometria de massas em tandem (CLAE-EM/EM). A cromatografia foi realizada utilizando uma coluna Phenomenex Gemini C18 5 µm (4,6 mm x 150 mm id) e uma fase móvel constituída por metanol/água/acetonitrila (40/40/20 v/v/v) + 0,1% de ácido fórmico. Para propiltiouracil e metiltiouracil os parâmetros otimizados do potencial de decluster, energia de colisão e potencial de saída da célula de colisão foram, -60 V, -26 eV e -5 V, respectivamente. O método teve um tempo de corrida cromatográfica de 2,5 minutos e uma curva de calibração linear no intervalo de 20-5000 ng/mL. O limite de quantificação foi de 20 ng/mL. Os testes de estabilidade não indicaram nenhuma degradação significativa. Este método de CLAE-EM/EM foi utilizado para avaliar a bioequivalência de duas formulações de comprimidos de 100 mg de propiltiouracil em voluntários saudáveis de ambos os sexos sob jejum e sob estado alimentado. A média com intervalo de confiança de 90% para teste e referência foi sem e com alimentos respectivamente, 109,28% (103,63-115,25%) e 115,60% (109,03-122,58%) para Cmax, 103,31% (100,74-105,96 %) e 103,40% (101,03-105,84) para ASClast. Conclusão: Este método oferece vantagens em relação aos descritos na literatura, tanto em termos de uma extração líquido-líquido simples sem processos de limpeza, bem como um tempo de execução mais rápido, 2,5 minutos. O limite inferior de quantificação de 20 ng/mL é adequado para estudos farmacocinéticos. Os resultados de desempenho do ensaio indicam que o método é preciso e exato para determinação de propiltiouracil em plasma humano. A formulação teste sem e com alimentos foi bioequivalente a formulação de referência. A administração de alimentos aumentou o Tmax e diminuiu a biodisponibilidade, Cmax e ASC / Abstract: A rapid, sensitive and specific method for quantifying propylthiouracil in human plasma using methylthiouracil as the internal standard is described. The analyte and the internal standard were extracted from plasma by liquid-liquid extraction using an organic solvent, ethyl acetate. The extracts were analyzed by high performance liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS). Chromatography was performed using a Phenomenex Gemini C18 5µm analytical column (4.6 mm x 150mm i.d.) and a mobile phase consisting of methanol/water/acetonitrile (40/40/20 v/v/v) + 0.1% of formic acid. For propylthiouracil and methylthiouracil, the optimized parameters of the declustering potential, collision energy and collision exit potential were -60 V, -26 eV and -5 V, respectively. The method had a chromatographic run time of 2.5 minutes and a linear calibration curve over the range 20-5000 ng/mL. The limit of quantification was 20 ng/mL. The stability tests indicated no significant degradation. This HPLC-MS/MS procedure was used to assess the bioequivalence of two propylthiouracil 100 mg tablet formulations in healthy volunteers of both sexes in fasted and fed state. The mean and 90% confidence interval of test and reference was in fasted and fed state respectively, 109.28% (103.63-115.25%) and 115.60% (109.03-122.58%) for Cmax, 103.31% (100.74-105.96%) and 103.40% (101.03-105.84) for AUClast. Conclusion: This method offers advantages over those previously reported, in terms of both a simple liquid¿liquid extraction without clean-up procedures, as well as a faster run time, 2.5 minutes. The lower limit of quantification of 20 ng/mL is suited for pharmacokinetic studies. The assay performance results indicate that the method is precise and accurate for the determination of the propylthiouracil in human plasma. The test formulation without and with food was bioequivalent to reference formulation. Food administration increased the Tmax and decreased the bioavailability, Cmax and AUC / Mestrado / Farmacologia / Mestra em Farmacologia