Speeding Dumbo: Pushing Asynchronous BFT Closer to Practice

Asynchronous BFT consensus can implement robust mission-critical decentralized services in the unstable or even adversarial wide-area network without relying on any form of timing assumption. Starting from the work of HoneyBadgerBFT (CCS 2016), several studies tried to push asynchronous BFT towards practice. In particular, in a recent work of Dumbo (CCS 2020), they redesigned the protocol backbone and used one multi-valued validated Byzantine agreement (MVBA) to replace $n$ concurrent asynchronous binary agreement (ABA) protocols and dramatically improved the performance. Despite those efforts, asynchronous BFT protocols remain to be slow, and in particular, the latency is still quite large. There are two reasons contributing to the inferior performance: (1) the reliable broadcast (RBC) protocols still incur substantial costs; (2) the MVBA protocols are quite complicated and heavy, and all existing constructions need dozens of rounds and take the majority of he overall latency. We first present a new construction of asynchronous BFT that replaces RBC instance with a cheaper broadcast component. It not only reduces the $O(n^3)$ message complexity incurred by $n$ RBCs to $O(n^2)$, but also saves up to 67% communications (in the presence of a fair network scheduler). Moreover, our technical core is a new MVBA protocol, Speeding MVBA, which is concretely more efficient than all existing MVBAs. It requires only 6 rounds in the best case and expected 12 rounds in the worst case (by contrast, several dozens of rounds in the MVBA from Cachin et al. [12] and the recent Dumbo-MVBA [32], and around 20 rounds in the MVBA from Abraham et al. [4]). Our new technique of the construction might be of independent interests. We implemented Speeding Dumbo and did extensive tests among up to 150 EC2 t2.medium instances evenly allocated in 15 AWS regions across the globe. The experimental results show that Speeding Dumbo reduces the latency to about a half of Dumbo\u27s, and also doubles the throughput of Dumbo, through all system scales from 4 nodes to 150 nodes. We also did tests to benchmark individual components such as the broadcasts and the MVBA protocols, which may be of interests for future improvements

Effect of Hydration Heat Inhibitor on Thermal Stress of Hydraulic Structures with Different Thicknesses

Concrete hydration heat inhibitor can inhibit the early hydration reaction of concrete and reduce the initial heat release of concrete. However, there is no in-depth research on the effect of hydration heat inhibitor on hydraulic structures with different thicknesses and constraints. In this paper, numerical simulation is used to study the change of temperature and stress field after adding hydration heat inhibitor by establishing the finite element models of tunnel lining, sluice, and gravity dam. The results show that the effect of the hydration heat inhibitors on reducing the temperature peak is inversely proportional to the thickness of the structure. A formula is put forward to evaluate their relation in this paper. When the thickness of the structure is about 6 m, there is no peak cutting effect. For the stress field, hydration heat inhibitor can greatly reduce the thermal stress of the thin-walled structure and make the structure meet the temperature control requirements; for the medium wall thickness structure, it can reduce the internal tensile stress about 50% and the surface tensile stress about 20%, and other temperature control measures are still needed to ensure that the surface tensile stress of the structure meets the requirements; for hydraulic structures with large volume and thickness, the application effect of the inhibitor has limitations, which can reduce the internal tensile stress about 30%, but the tensile stress in the surface area will increase about 7% due to the increase of the internal and external temperature difference; therefore, other temperature control measures such as arranging cooling water pipe, strengthening surface insulation, and so on are needed to ensure that temperature cracks do not occur. This paper provides references and suggestions for the research and engineering application of hydration heat inhibitor

Forecasting regional income inequality in China

In this study, the mathematical models with Gini coefficients and variation coefficients are used to study the time-series properties of China’s regional income differences. The result shows that from 1952 to 1978 the differences increase; from 1978 to the beginning of 1990s decrease; and from the beginning of 1990s to 1995 increase a little. In addition, the multi-level autoregressive models with time-varying parameters are used to predict the differences of China’s regional per capita income from 1996 to 2000. The per capita income levels of various regions in China have also been forecasted by using adaptive control algorithms to depict an acceptable level of income inequality for policy making

Metabolic networks of plasma and joint fluid base on differential correlation.

Whether osteoarthritis (OA) is a systemic metabolic disorder remains controversial. The aim of this study was to investigate the metabolic characteristics between plasma and knee joint fluid (JF) of patients with advanced OA using a differential correlation metabolic (DCM) networks approach. Plasma and JF were collected during the joint replacement surgery of patients with knee OA. The biological samples were pretreated with standard procedures for metabolite analysis. The metabolic profiling was conducted by means of liquid mass spectrometry coupled with a AbsoluteIDQ kit. A DCM network approach was adopted for analyzing the metabolomics data between the plasma and JF. The variation in the correlation of the pairwise metabolites was quantified across the plasma and JF samples, and networks analysis was used to characterize the difference in the correlations of the metabolites from the two sample types. Core metabolites that played an important role in the DCM networks were identified via topological analysis. One hundred advanced OA patients (50 men and 50 women) were included in this study, with an average age of 65.0 ± 7.6 years (65.6 ± 7.1 years for females and 64.4 ± 8.1 years for males) and a mean BMI of 32.6 ± 5.8 kg/m2 (33.4 ± 6.3 kg/m2 for females and 31.7 ± 5.3 kg/m2 for males). Age and BMI matched between the male and female groups. One hundred and forty-five nodes, 567 edges, and 131 nodes, 407 edges were found in the DCM networks (p < 0.05) of the female and male groups, respectively. Six metabolites in the female group and 5 metabolites in the male group were identified as key nodes in the network. There was a significant difference in the differential correlation metabolism networks of plasma and JF that may be related to local joint metabolism. Focusing on these key metabolites may help uncover the pathogenesis of knee OA. In addition, the differential metabolic correlation between plasma and JF mostly overlapped, indicating that these common correlations of pairwise metabolites may be a reflection of systemic characteristics of JF and that most significant correlation variations were just a result of "housekeeping" biological reactions

Comparative Pharmacokinetic Study of Forchlorfenuron in Adult and Juvenile Rats

Forchlorfenuron (CPPU) is a plant growth regulator extensively used in agriculture. However, studies on CPPU pharmacokinetics are lacking. We established and validated a rapid, sensitive, and accurate liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry method for CPPU detection in rat plasma. CPPU pharmacokinetics was evaluated in adult and juvenile rats orally treated with 10, 30, and 90 mg/kg of the compound. The area under the plasma drug concentration–time curve from 0 to 24 h (AUC), at the final time point sampled (AUC0–t), and the maximum drug concentration of CPPU increased in a dose-dependent manner. The pharmacokinetic parameters AUC0–t and absolute bioavailability were higher in the juvenile rats than in adult rats. The mean residence time and AUC0–t of juvenile rats in the gavage groups, except for the 10 mg/kg dose, were significantly higher in comparison to those observed for adult rats (p &lt; 0.001). The plasma clearance of CPPU in juvenile rats was slightly lower than that in the adult rats. Taken together, juvenile rats were more sensitive to CPPU than adult rats, which indicates potential safety risks of CPPU in minors

Green Synthesis of Three-Dimensional Au Nanorods@TiO₂ Nanocomposites as Self-Cleaning SERS Substrate for Sensitive, Recyclable, and In Situ Sensing Environmental Pollutants

In this work, a simple, low-cost, green, and mild method for the preparation of three-dimensional nanocomposite materials of gold nanorods (Au NRs)@TiO2 is reported. The surface of Au NRs was coated with TiO2 in situ reduction at room temperature without a complicated operation. The synthetic Au NRs@TiO2 nanocomposites were used as surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) active substrates for the reusable and sensitive detection of environmental pollutants. The results showed that the pollutants on Au NRs@TiO2 nanocomposites have higher SERS activity and reproducibility than those on the Au NR substrate without the presence of TiO2. Moreover, the SERS substrate can be readily recycled by UV-assisted self-cleaning to remove residual analyte molecules. Malachite green (MG) and crystal violet (CV) were used as examples to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed sensor for the sensitive detection of environmental pollutants. The results showed that the limit of detections (LODs) were 0.75 μg/L and 0.50 μg/L for MG and CV, respectively, with the recoveries ranging from 86.67% to 91.20% and 83.70% to 89.00%. Meanwhile, the SERS substrate can be easily regenerated by UV light irradiation. Our investigation revealed that within three cycles, the Au NRs@TiO2 substrates still maintained the high SERS enhancement effect that they showed when first used for SERS detection. These results indicated that the method can be used to detect MG and CV in really complex samples. Due to the high sensitivity, reusability, and portability and the rapid detection property of the proposed sensor, it can have potential applications in the on-site detection of environmental pollutants in a complex sample matrix

High-density cultivation of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium using an automatic feedback feeding method

A new automatic feeding system has been developed, to allow the high-density cultivation of homofermentative Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species. The system allowed the automatic supplementation of glucose, and neutralization of acidity based on the consumption of glucose and the production of acids in the growth medium through a sophisticated computerized program. During the pH-controlled culturing, the quantity of NaOH was directly related to the quantity of acids produced. The system supplying the glucose was linked to alkali supplementation to achieve the automatic addition of k mL glucose after 1 mL NaOH solution was automatically added. The glucose consumption and acid production patterns of each strain were carefully studied before the application of the automatic feeding system. All strains (Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species) used approximately 90% of the glucose for the production of acids. The NaOH concentration in the alkali bottle and the glucose concentration in the feed bottle were based on the following formulae: (homofermentative Lactobacillus); (Bifidobacterium). After using this system, the glucose concentration in the fermentation broth remained stable during the culturing of the strains, and the density of the strains was significantly increased, demonstrating the effectiveness of the method