Routing jobs to parallel servers is a common and important task in today's computer systems. Join-the-shortest-queue (JSQ) routing minimizes the mean response time under rather general settings as long as the servers are identical and service times are independent and exponentially distributed. Apart from this, surprisingly few optimality results exist, mainly due to the complexities arising from the infinite state spaces. Indeed, it is difficult to analyze the performance of any given routing policy. In this paper, we consider an elementary job routing problem with heterogeneous servers and general cost structures. By a novel approximation, we reduce the state space to finite size, which enables us to estimate the mean performance, and to determine (practically) optimal routing policies, for a large class of cost structures. We demonstrate the approximation and its application to job routing policy optimization in numerical examples. CCS CONCEPTS • Mathematics of computing → Queueing theory; • Theory of computation → Markov decision processes; Routing and network design problems; • Information systems → Data centers;
Powerful software tools, such as software development environments, often have complex graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that are not intuitive to handle, especially when performing complex, multistep operations. We hypothesize that sketching could be a more intuitive way of expressing user intentions than navigating nested menus or memorizing keyboard shortcuts to accomplish complex operations. Enabling this vision requires software capable of both allowing the user to sketch anywhere on a GUI, and interpreting those sketches as specific commands to be performed within the integrated development environment (IDE). In this paper, we report on preliminary results of an elicitation study performed to gather insights into how developers would use a sketch-based interface. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Interaction techniques; Empirical studies in interaction design; Touch screens; • Software and its engineering → Integrated and visual development environments.
Software engineers routinely use sketches (informal, ad-hoc drawings) to visualize and communicate complex ideas for colleagues or themselves. We hypothesize that sketching could also be used as a novel interaction modality in integrated software development environments (IDEs), allowing developers to express desired source code manipulations by sketching right on top of the IDE, rather than remembering keyboard shortcuts or using a mouse to navigate menus and dialogs. For an initial assessment of the viability of this idea, we conducted an elicitation study that prompted software developers to express a number of common IDE commands through sketches. For many of our task prompts, we observed considerable agreement in how developers would express the respective commands through sketches, suggesting that further research on a more formal sketch-based visual command language for IDEs would be worthwhile. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Interaction techniques; Empirical studies in interaction design; Touch screens; User studies; • Software and its engineering → Integrated and visual development environments.
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