Pooling (resource management)
In resource management, pooling is the grouping together of resources for the purposes of maximizing advantage or minimizing risk to the users. The term is used in finance, computing and equipment management.
Finance
Pooling is the grouping together of assets, and related strategies for minimizing risk. For example:- Asset-backed securities is a security whose income payments are backed by a specified pool of underlying assets.
- Mortgage-backed securities is a type of asset-backed security whereas the underlying assets are mortgages.
- Collateralized debt obligations is a type of structured asset-backed security.
- Collateralized mortgage obligations is a type of complex debt security that repackages and directs the payments of principal and interest from a collateral pool to different types and maturities of securities, thereby meeting investor needs.
Accounting
- In acquisition, pooling of interest was a merger-accounting method that was taken out of the market in the United States by the Financial Accounting Standards Board on June 30, 2001. The method combines the book value of assets and liabilities of the two companies to create the new balance sheet of the combined companies.
Supply chain management
- Intergovernmental risk pool is the use of the risk pool risk management technique commonly practiced by private insurance companies, but applied to public entities who come together to form a pool to provide protection against catastrophic risks such as floods or earthquakes.
Computing
Pooling IT resources involves virtualization of typical IT stacks server, storage and networking. Users benefit from lower individual investments since resources are shared. Although shared infrastructures have huge benefits potential issues on the environment have impact on the complete environment. A thorough analysis of the infrastructure is recommended to identify potential single point of failure. One may opt for 'private' instances for specific needs or for specific reasons. On the level of resource pooling, bigger suppliers tend to have the benefit of being able to provide shared support environments with round the clock service. Do you prefer access to a service desk round the clock with potential less expertise or do you want to rely on a single support engineer "- Memory pooling is the use of a pool for memory management that allows dynamic memory allocation by preallocating a number of memory blocks with the same size called the memory pool, and is an alternative to dynamic memory allocation by techniques such as malloc and C++'s operator new which can suffer from fragmentation because of variable block sizes.
- Thread pooling is a software design pattern for achieving concurrency of execution in a computer program by maintaining a pool of multiple threads waiting for tasks to be allocated for concurrent execution by a supervising program, and increases performance and avoids latency due to frequent creation and destruction of threads for short-lived tasks
- Object pooling is a software design pattern that keeps a pool of initialized objects ready that are ready to be used, rather than allocating and destroying them on demand.
- Connection pooling in computer science is a caching technique used to enhance the performance of executing commands on a database.