Efficient Aggregated Deliveries with Strong Guarantees in an Event-based Distributed System

A popular approach to designing large scale distributed systems is to follow an event-based approach. In an event-based approach, a set of software components interact by producing and consuming events. The event-based model allows for the decoupling of software components, allowing distributed systems to scale to a large number of components. Event correlation allows for higher order reasoning of events by constructing complex events from single, consumable events. In many cases, event correlation applications rely on centralized setups or broker overlay networks. In the case of centralized setups, the guarantees for complex event delivery are stronger, however, centralized setups create performance bottlenecks and single points of failure. With broker overlays, the performance and fault tolerance are improved but at the cost of weaker guarantees

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Abstract Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries

Efficient aggregated deliveries with strong guarantees in event-based distributed systems

A popular approach to designing large scale distributed systems is to follow an event-based approach. In an event-based approach, a set of software components interact by producing and consuming events. The event-based model allows for the decoupling of software components, allowing distributed systems to scale to a large number of components. Event correlation allows for higher order reasoning of events by constructing complex events from single, consumable events. In many cases, event correlation applications rely on centralized setups or broker overlay networks. In the case of centralized setups, the guarantees for complex event delivery are stronger, however, centralized setups create performance bottlenecks and single points of failure. With broker overlays, the performance and fault tolerance are improved but at the cost of weaker guarantees. The goal of this dissertation is to develop an efficient middleware for event correlation while still providing strong guarantees. First, we show what is necessary for strong guarantees in asynchronous distributed event-based systems that perform event correlation. Secondly, we provide the main deliverable of this dissertation: a generic middleware system, FAIDECS, which utilizes event types to efficiently correlate individually multicast events while providing strong guarantees for asynchronous event-based distributed systems. We then provide semantic alternatives to those provided in FAIDECS, showing what strong guarantees are able to be provided given certain operators

Multicast with aggregated deliveries

An increasing number of distributed systems relies on forms of message correlation, which result in atomic delivery of multiple messages aggregated by following process-specific criteria. Generally, more than one process is aggregating messages, implying that messages are multicast. While delivery guarantees for multicast scenarios with single message delivery are well understood, existing systems and models for aggregated deliveries either consider only unicast, centralized setups, or focus on efficiency thus providing only best-effort guarantees. This paper investigates the foundations of Multi-Delivery Multicast (MDMcast) in asynchronous distributed systems with crashstop failures. We first describe a succinct aggregation model with a concise and generic predicate grammar for expressing conjunctions of types on messages and properties for a corresponding multicast primitive, which we term Conjunction-MDMcast (C-MDMcast). We show that for processes interested in identical conjunctions to achieve agreement on delivered messages, a total order on individual messages (or equivalent oracle) is not only useful but necessary, which is clearly opposed to single-message deliveries. We show this indirectly by exhibiting an algorithm implementing C-MDMcast on top of Total Order Broadcast (TOBcast) and viceversa for a majority of correct processes. Then, we extend our predicate grammar with disjunctions, leading to the specification of Disjunction-MDMcast (D-MDMcast). We exhibit an algorithm implementing D-MDM-cast, derived from our algorithm implementing C-MDMcast. We formalize several additional properties for both of our specifications, including ordering properties on aggregated messages and show how our respective algorithms implement these