International Business Machines Corporation

John Ferguson Linton

David B Kumhyr

Franck Barillaud

John Patrick Whitfield

Craig M Lawton

David E Cox

Kathy Anstey

Karl D Gottschalk

Demetrios James Marinos

Allen Jackson Croft, Jr

Round trip time, bottleneck link speed, and hop count information from one node to the remaining nodes within a network is collected and processed by an adaptive resonance theory (ART) neural network to classify the nodes by physical location or site group. For each site group, round trip time from one node to the remaining nodes is then collected and processed utilizing an ART neural network to classify the nodes into one or more physical groups. The resulting breakdown of site groups within the network and physical groups within the site groups forms a model which may be employed by networking and system management applications. No private or proprietary vendor specific information from communications devices within the network need be employed to develop the model, only publicly available information regarding communications parameters.

Use of generic classifiers to determine physical topology in heterogeneous networking environments

A search string for searching data distributed among various hosts employing different character encoding schemes or having different case-mapping capabilities is entered in a multi-field text string class. The multi-field text string class includes methods for transliterating characters within the original search string based on defined character equivalence tables. When the search string is received at a data host, a comparison is made of the operating system run on the originating data processing system, identified in a sourceVariant field of the multi-field text string class, and the operating system run on the data host, identified in a targetVariant field of the multi-field text string class. If necessary, an appropriate character equivalence table is selected and a variant of the search string is generated by transliteration. The search string variant is then passed to a search engine to search local data, either with or without the original search string, and matches identified are returned as matches for the original search string. Accurate search results are therefore produced despite the presence of different character encoding schemes, such as EBCDIC versus ASCII/Unicode, or operating systems which do not support case mapping.

Method, system and computer program product for case and character-encoding insensitive searching of international databases

In a network composed of communicating resources, the status of an aggregate resource may be determined by calculations based upon the status assumed by the real resources contained within the aggregate rather than being determined directly. The status of real resources may be propagated to still higher aggregate resources whose own status is based upon the status of the real resources contained within it. An aggregate resource may have multiple potential statuses and a decision as to which status to report for an aggregate resource at a given time is calculated based upon the status of the underlying real resources which it contains. Each real resource has associated with it another parameter which is its aggregation priority value indicating to what degree a change in its status will affect higher level nodes or aggregates in a network hierarchy. In assigning a new aggregate status to a given aggregate resource, the calculation for aggregate status determines the status of the real underlying resources that are descendents of the aggregate resource, retrieves the appropriate threshold levels for status change for the aggregate, and checks the aggregation priority of the real resources that are descendents of the aggregate and are currently in an unsatisfactory state and then assigns a new aggregate resource status.

Method and system for reporting the status of an aggregate resource

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Raleigh, NC, United States of America

John Ferguson Linton