Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Statistical Analysis of Circuit Timing Using Majorization
Future miniaturization of silicon transistors following Moore's Law may be in jeopardy as it becomes harder to precisely define the behavior and shape of nanoscale...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Where the Chips May Fall
The traditional approach to circuit design has been to build chips that work correctly at extreme-case process...
From Communications of the ACM
Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality?: An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista
Existing literature on distributed development in software engineering and other fields discusses various challenges,...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Maintaining Quality in the Face of Distributed Development
It was a problem that should not have taken three weeks to solve. The documentation claimed that if a function was called...
From Communications of the ACM
Formal Verification of a Realistic Compiler
This paper reports on the development and formal verification of CompCert, a compiler from Clight (a large subset of the C programming language) to PowerPC assembly...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Compiler's Story
In the early 1970s, pioneers like Floyd, Dijkstra, and Hoare argued that programs should be formally specified and proven...
From Communications of the ACM
Apprenticeship Learning For Helicopter Control
Autonomous helicopter flight is widely regarded to be a highly challenging control problem. As helicopters are highly unstable and exhibit complicated dynamical...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Ultimate Pilot Program
In one scene from The Matrix, two leaders of the human resistance are trapped on the roof of a skyscraper. The only means of escape is by helicopter, which neither...
From Communications of the ACM
Two Hardware-Based Approaches For Deterministic Multiprocessor Replay
Modern computer systems are inherently nondeterministic due to a variety of events that occur during an execution. The lack of repeatability that arises from this...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Software and Hardware Support For Deterministic Replay of Parallel Programs
From Communications of the ACM
Securing Frame Communication in Browsers
Many Web sites embed third-party content in frames, relying on the browser's security policy to protect against malicious content. However, frames provide insufficient...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Reframing Security For the Web
The web has brought exciting new functionality while simultaneously requiring new mechanisms to make it secure. We've...
From Communications of the ACM
Scalable Synchronous Queues
In a thread-safe concurrent queue, consumers typically wait for producers to make data available. In a synchronous queue, producers similarly wait for consumers...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Highly Concurrent Data Structures
The advent of multicore architectures has produced a Renaissance in the study of highly concurrent data structures.
From Communications of the ACM
Lest We Remember: Cold-Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys
DRAM retains its contents for several seconds after power is lost. Although DRAM becomes less reliable when it is not refreshed, it is not immediately erased, and...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Chilly Sense of Security
Many systems rely on keeping a master key secret. But technological progress can undermine old assumptions.
From Communications of the ACM
Integrating Nand Flash Devices Onto Servers
In this paper, we examine the use of Flash storage in the server domain. Wear-out has the potential to limit the use of Flash in this domain. To seriously consider...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Integrating Flash Devices
Flash memory nowadays seems to be in every discussion about system architecture. Sure enough, flash memory boasts...
From Communications of the ACM
Relative Fitness Modeling
Relative fitness is a new approach to modeling the performance of storage devices. In contrast to a conventional model, which predicts the performance of an application's...
From Communications of the ACM