Abstract: Prosthetic valved conduits are provided that include a leaflet construct coupled between two portions of a conduit. Each leaflet has a free edge and a leaflet attachment edge. The leaflet attachment edge is disposed between a first conduit distal end and a second conduit proximal end that are coaxial therebetween defining a junction.

Abstract: The disclosed embodiments provide a system that facilitates the deployment and execution of a software offering. During operation, the system obtains a set of requirements associated with a service definition of the software offering. Next, the system uses the requirements to automatically provision a set of infrastructure slices for use by the software offering without requiring manual configuration of the resources by a user, wherein each of the infrastructure slices includes a set of resources configured to support a workload associated with the software offering.

Abstract: In a cluster system comprising at least two nodes connected via a communication network and having a name and a host weight assigned to it, a method is implemented comprising the steps of inspecting the communication link, determining which node has to be shut down after a failure, creating an advertisement report for the node to be shut down, sending the advertisement report to at least one node of the cluster system, calculating a delay time depending on the weight of the first node and sending the shut down command to the node for which a failure report was received. In one embodiment of the invention the advertisement reports include a master node, which allows identifying and specifying the surviving subcluster. The method will send shut down signals to those nodes of a subcluster with lower weight than the surviving subcluster. A failsafe mechanism is implemented.

Abstract: A method for eliminating a computer from a cluster to guarantee data integrity and application recovery on another computer includes installing, on each cluster node, a shutdown facility with a list of shutdown agents. The shutdown agents are independent executable programs that implement a shutdown method.