The emerging global scientific collaborations demand a scalable, efficient, reliable, and still convenient data access and management scheme. To fulfill these requirements, this paper describes a replicated file system that supports mutable (i.e., read/write) replication with strong consistency guarantees, small performance penalty, high failure resilience, and good scaling properties. The pape...

We present a protocol for general state machine replication – a method that provides strong consistency – that has high performance in a wide-area network. In particular, our protocol Mencius has high throughput under high client load and low latency under low client load even under changing wide-area network environment and client load. We develop our protocol as a derivation from the well-kno...

This article discusses the problem of estimation of parameters in finite mixtures when the mixture components are assumed to be symmetric and to come from the same location family. We refer to these mixtures as semi-parametric because no additional assumptions other than symmetry are made regarding the parametric form of the component distributions. Because the class of symmetric distributions ...

This paper introduces volume leases as a mechanism for providing cache consistency for large-scale, geographically distributed networks. Volume leases are a variation of leases, which were originally designed for distributed file systems. Using trace-driven simulation, we compare two new algorithms against four existing cache consistency algorithms and show that our new algorithms provide stron...

The distribution of the length of a typical chord of a stationary random set is an interesting feature of the set’s whole distribution. We give a nonparametric estimator of the chord length distribution and prove its strong consistency. We report on a simulation experiment in which our estimator compared favorably to a reduced sample estimator. Both estimators are illustrated by applying them t...

Due to their image-based nature, “contextual” approaches are very attractive to estimate evapotranspiration (ET) from remotely-sensed land surface temperature (LST) data. Their application is however limited to highly heterogeneous areas where the soil and vegetation temperature endmembers (Tends) can be observed at the thermal sensor resolution. This paper aims to develop a simple theoretical ...

The Play-the-Winner (PW) rule is an important method in clinical trials for patient allocation with two treatments, in which the probability a treatment is assigned to the coming patient depends upon the response of the previous patient. In this paper, we consider a general kind of PW rule for multi-treatment adaptive designs, in which the probability a treatment is assigned to the coming patie...

This paper addresses reconfiguration of a Replicated State Machine (RSM) in an asynchronous system. It is well known that consensus cannot be solved in an asynchronous system. Therefore an RSM providing strong consistency, cannot guarantee progress in an asynchronous system. However, we show that reconfiguring the RSM is possible in a purely asynchronous system. This differs from all existing r...

It may be downloaded, printed and reproduced only for personal or classroom use. Absolutely no downloading or copying may be done for, or on behalf of, any for‐profit commercial firm or other commercial purpose without the explicit permission of the Econometric Society. For this purpose, contact Claire Sashi, General Manager, at [email protected]. This paper provides a simulated mome...

This paper investigates the asymptotic theory for a factor GARCH model. Sufficient conditions for strict stationarity, existence of certain moments, geometric ergodicity and βmixing with exponential decay rates are established. These conditions allow for volatility spill-over and integrated GARCH. We then show the strong consistency and asymptotic normality of the quasi-maximum likelihood estim...