Date:    Fri, 28 Apr 2000 16:00:27 -0400
From:    "Gary S. Trujillo" <gtrujillo@association.org>
Subject: AIP-Boston meeting - 9 May at MIT (Rm. 6-120)

Life in the Fast Lane:  what your organization can do to improve
server responsiveness and reliability to keep the customer satisfied

During the months of May and June, AIP-Boston will host a two-part
series looking at hardware and software developments that offer the
prospect of rapid and reliable exchanges of all forms of information
and multimedia content via the Internet.  The May meeting will focus on
what is being done inside organizations to enable Internet-mediated
transactions to take place quickly and efficiently, and the June meeting
will examine how the Internet itself is being improved through the
deployment of newly-developed hardware technologies.

As Internet-mediated transactions become more a part of our daily lives,
and companies grow ever more dependent upon revenue derived from these
transactions, there is an increasing necessity to ensure that Internet
server operations are dependable and efficient.  At the May meeting of
AIP-Boston, our panel of speakers will help us understand the methods
and technologies being employed within organizations interacting with
the public and with one another by means of the Internet to improve
their ability to deliver products and services and to exchange
information.  We'll look at the use of Internet traffic management and
techniques such as load balancing and sophisticated caching strategies,
which are being used to provide faster service and to handle phenomena
such as "flash crowds" (a sudden flood of resource demands generally
triggered by some real-world announcement like a news bulletin or a TV
ad directing viewers to a commercial Web site).  We'll learn about the
various sorts of performance measurement tools now available for getting
a better understanding of present and potential system bottlenecks, and
we'll be told about new techniques for dynamic routing of e-commerce
traffic to specific servers based upon browser "cookies."  We will also
get an introduction to some of the theory and terminology that has been
developed over the past several years that is integral to understanding
the problems posed by increased demands being placed upon commercial
servers and new solutions that have become available.

Our speakers, who will be announced next week, include a computer
science professor from Boston University and one or two representatives
of companies whose products enable operators of Internet-based services
to increase their responsiveness and reliability.  The meeting will take
place from 6:30 - 9:00 PM on Tuesday, 9 May in Room 6-120 on the MIT
campus.

For more details on the meeting, please check our Web page at
"http://boston.us.association.org/meetings.html" around the middle
of next week.

Gary Trujillo
AIP-Boston, acting vice-president
http://boston.us.association.org/
gtrujillo@association.org
617-776-0121