Process as a world transaction

Transaction is process closure: for a transaction is the limiting process of process itself. In the process world view the universe is the ultimate (intensional) transaction of all its extensional limiting processes that we call reality. ANPA’s PROGRAM UNIVERSE is a computational model which can be explored empirically in commercial database transactions where there has been a wealth of activity over the real world for the last 40 years. Process category theory demonstrates formally the fundamental distinctions between the classical model of a transaction as in PROGRAM UNIVERSE and physical reality. The paper concludes with a short technical summary for those who do not wish to read all the detail

A Survey of Fault-Tolerance and Fault-Recovery Techniques in Parallel Systems

Supercomputing systems today often come in the form of large numbers of commodity systems linked together into a computing cluster. These systems, like any distributed system, can have large numbers of independent hardware components cooperating or collaborating on a computation. Unfortunately, any of this vast number of components can fail at any time, resulting in potentially erroneous output. In order to improve the robustness of supercomputing applications in the presence of failures, many techniques have been developed to provide resilience to these kinds of system faults. This survey provides an overview of these various fault-tolerance techniques.Comment: 11 page

An Atomicity-Generating Layer for Anonymous Currencies

Atomicity is a necessary element for reliable transactions (Financial Service Technology Consortium, 1995; Camp, Sirbu and Tygar, 1995; Tygar, 1996). Anonymity is also an issue of great importance not only to designers of commerce systems, (Chaum, 1982; Chaum, 1989; Chaum, Fiat & Naor, 1988; Medvinski, 1993), but also to those concerned with the societal effects of information technologies (Branscomb 1994. Compaine 1985, National Research Council 1996, Neumann 1993, Poole 1983). Yet there has been a tradeoff between these two elements in commerce system design. Reliable systems, which provide highly atomic transactions, offer limited anonymity (Visa, 1995; Sirbu and Tygar, 1995; Mastercard, 1995, Low, Maxemchuk and Paul, 1993) . Anonymous systems (Chaum, 1985; Chaum 1989; Medvinski, 1993) do not offer reliable transactions as shown in Yee, 1994; Camp, 1999; and Tygar, 1996. This work illustrates that any electronic token currency can be made reliable with the addition of this atomicity-generating layer.IB

Exploring a framework for advanced electronic business transactions

With the emergence of service-oriented computing technology, companies embrace new ways of carrying out business transactions electronically. Since the parties involved in an electronic business transaction (eBT) manage a heterogeneous information-systems infrastructure within their organizational domains, the collaboration complexity is considerable and safeguarding an interorganizational collaboration with an eBT is difficult, but of high significance. This paper describes a conceptual framework that pays attention to the complexities of an eBT and its differentiating characteristics that go further than traditional database transactions. Since the eBT is a framework that comprises separate levels, pre-existing transaction concepts are explored for populating the respective levels. To show the feasibility of the described eBT framework, industry initiatives that are aspiring to become business-transaction standards, are checked for eBT compatible characteristics. Since realizing an eBT framework raises many tricky issues, the paper maps out important research areas that require scientific attention. Essentially, it is required to investigate how the business semantics influences the nature of an eBT throughout its lifecycle.Peer reviewe

The Atomic Manifesto: a Story in Four Quarks

This report summarizes the viewpoints and insights gathered in the Dagstuhl Seminar on Atomicity in System Design and Execution, which was attended by 32 people from four different scientific communities: database and transaction processing systems, fault tolerance and dependable systems, formal methods for system design and correctness reasoning, and hardware architecture and programming languages. Each community presents its position in interpreting the notion of atomicity and the existing state of the art, and each community identifies scientific challenges that should be addressed in future work. In addition, the report discusses common themes across communities and strategic research problems that require multiple communities to team up for a viable solution. The general theme of how to specify, implement, compose, and reason about extended and relaxed notions of atomicity is viewed as a key piece in coping with the pressing issue of building and maintaining highly dependable systems that comprise many components with complex interaction patterns