Engineering Commons^™

Traffic to a Web site can vary dramatically. At the same time it is highly desirable that a Web site is reactive. To provide crisp interaction on thin clients, 150 milliseconds has been suggested as an upper bound on response time. Unfortunately, the popular Apache Web server is limited in its capabilities to be reactive under varying traffic. To address this problem, we design in this paper an adaptive controller for the Apache Web server. A modified recursive least squares algorithm is used to identify system dynamics and a minimum degree pole placement controller is implemented to adjust the maximum …

Networks analysts often need to compare nodes in different parts of a network. When zoomed to fit a computer screen, the detailed structure and node labels of even a moderately-sized network (say, with 500 nodes) can become invisible or difficult to read. Still, the coarse network structure typically remains visible, and helps orient an analyst’s zooming, scrolling, and panning operations. These operations are very useful when studying details and reading node labels, but in the process of zooming in on one network region, an analyst may lose track of details elsewhere. To address such problems, we present in this paper …

Information-rich data sets bring several challenges in the areas of visualization and analysis, even when associated with node-link network visualizations. This paper presents an integration of multi-focus and multi-level techniques that enable interactive, multi-step comparisons in node-link networks. We describe NetEx, a visualization tool that enables users to simultaneously explore different parts of a network and its thematic data, such as time series or conditional probability tables. NetEx, implemented as a Cytoscape plug-in, has been applied to the analysis of electrical power networks, Bayesian networks, and the Enron e-mail repository. In this paper we briefly discuss visualization and analysis of …