Communications of the ACM
Escaping Legacy It Systems
Credit: Courtesy of MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed a computer model of a corporate information infrastructure that could help information technology managers predict the effects of changes to their networks.
The researchers compared their model's predictions to data supplied by Ford Motor and found that its estimates of response times for queries sent to company servers were within 5 percent to 13 percent of real times.
The researchers, led by graduate student Sergio Herrero-Lopez, professor John R. Williams, and researcher Abel Sanchez, modeled every processor in every server, every connection between processors and disk drives, and every connection between servers and between data centers. The researchers also modeled the way in which processing tasks are distributed across the network by software running on multiple servers.
"We take the software application and we break it into very basic operations, like logging in, saving files, searching, opening, filtering--basically, all the classic things that people do when they are searching for information," Herrero-Lopez says.
In addition, the researchers' model represents each of the transactions in terms of the computational resources it requires to execute.
From MIT News
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Abstracts Copyright © 2011 Information Inc. 
, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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