Constant RMR Group Mutual Exclusion for Arbitrarily Many Processes and Sessions

Group mutual exclusion (GME), introduced by Joung in 1998, is a natural synchronization problem that generalizes the classical mutual exclusion and readers and writers problems. In GME a process requests a session before entering its critical section; processes are allowed to be in their critical sections simultaneously provided they have requested the same session. We present a GME algorithm that (1) is the first to achieve a constant Remote Memory Reference (RMR) complexity for both cache coherent and distributed shared memory machines; and (2) is the first that can be accessed by arbitrarily many dynamically allocated processes and with arbitrarily many session names. Neither of the existing GME algorithms satisfies either of these two important properties. In addition, our algorithm has constant space complexity per process and satisfies the two strong fairness properties, first-come-first-served and first-in-first-enabled. Our algorithm uses an atomic instruction set supported by most modern processor architectures, namely: read, write, fetch-and-store and compare-and-swap

Nationwide Outbreak of Candida auris Infections Driven by COVID-19 Hospitalizations, Israel, 2021–2022

We report an outbreak of Candida auris across multiple healthcare facilities in Israel. For the period of May 2014–May 2022, a total of 209 patients with C. auris infection or colonization were identified. The C. auris incidence rate increased 30-fold in 2021 (p = 0.00015), corresponding in time with surges of COVID-19–related hospitalization. Multilocus sequence typing revealed hospital-level outbreaks with distinct clones. A clade III clone, imported into Israel in 2016, accounted for 48.8% of typed isolates after January 2021 and was more frequently resistant to fluconazole (100% vs. 63%; p = 0.00017) and voriconazole (74% vs. 5.2%; p<0.0001) than were non–clade III isolates. A total of 23% of patients had COVID-19, and 78% received mechanical ventilation. At the hospital level, outbreaks initially involved mechanically ventilated patients in specialized COVID-19 units and then spread sequentially to ventilated non–COVID-19 patients and nonventilated patients