Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Measuring Home Broadband Performance
We present the results from the first study of Internet access link performance measured directly from home routers. Our findings provide a snapshot of access network...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Example-Driven Program Synthesis For End-User Programming
As information technology has come to permeate our society, broader classes of users have developed the need for more sophisticated data manipulation and processing...
From Communications of the ACM
Spreadsheet Data Manipulation Using Examples
Millions of computer end users need to perform tasks over large spreadsheet data, yet lack the programming knowledge to do such tasks automatically. We present...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: For Better or Worse, Benchmarks Shape a Field
Like other IT fields, computer architects initially reported incomparable results. We quickly saw the folly of this approach. We then went through a sequence...
From Communications of the ACM
Looking Back and Looking Forward: Power, Performance, and Upheaval
The past 10 years have delivered two significant revolutions. Microprocessor design has been transformed — leading to multicore processors. And an entirely new...
From Communications of the ACM
Lightweight Modular Staging: A Pragmatic Approach to Runtime Code Generation and Compiled DSLs
Good software engineering practice demands generalization and abstraction, whereas high performance demands specialization and concretization. These goals are at...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Fox and the Hedgehog
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Philosophers have used this line, attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, to capture...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: An Experiment in Determinism
It is widely held that parallel programming is far more difficult and error prone than writing sequential code. In particular, the myriad allowable interleavings...
From Communications of the ACM
Efficient System-Enforced Deterministic Parallelism
We introduce a new parallel programming model addressing the issues facing current methods of executing parallel programs deterministically, and use Determinator...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Best Algorithms + Best Computers = Powerful Match
Say you want to simulate the motion over time of the stars in a galaxy to learn about how galaxies formed and why the universe appears as it does. Is it feasible...
From Communications of the ACM
A Massively Parallel Adaptive Fast Multipole Method on Heterogeneous Architectures
We describe a parallel fast multipole method for highly nonuniform distributions of particles. We employ both distributed memory parallelism and shared memory parallelism...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Benefits of Capability-Based Protection
Affordable personal computing hardware and the usable GUI-based PC operating systems made the vision of "a computer on every desktop and in every home" a reality...
From Communications of the ACM
A Taste of Capsicum: Practical Capabilities For Unix
Capsicum is a lightweight operating system capability and sandbox framework planned for inclusion in FreeBSD 9. Capsicum extends, rather than replaces, UNIX APIs...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Compiling What to How
The following paper by Viktor Kuncak et al. integrates declarative programming into a general-purpose language, allowing one to escape the host language when...
From Communications of the ACM
Software Synthesis Procedures
Automated synthesis of program fragments from specifications can make programs easier to write and easier to reason about. To integrate synthesis into programming...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Content-Centric Networking
Much has changed in the 50 years since the invention of packet switching and the early network designs and deployments that...
From Communications of the ACM
Networking Named Content
Current network use is dominated by content distribution and retrieval yet current networking protocols are designed for conversations between hosts. We present...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Safety First!
Software misbehaves all too often. This is a truism, but also the driving force behind many computing techniques intended to increase software reliability, safety...
From Communications of the ACM
Safe to the Last Instruction: Automated Verification of a Type-Safe Operating System
High-level computer applications build on services provided by lower-level software layers. Unfortunately, today's low-level software still suffers from a steady...
From Communications of the ACM