Fighting Physics: A Tough Battle
The laws of physics and the Internet's routing infrastructure affect performance in a big way.
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Hard-Disk Drives: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
New drive technologies and increased capacities create new categories of failure modes that will influence system designs.
Network Front-End Processors, Yet Again
The history of NFE processors sheds light on the trade-offs involved in designing network stack software.
The pervasive and long-lasting sockets API has remained largely unchanged since 1982. How have developers worked around its inherent limitations and what is the future of sockets in a changing networked world?
Users with no security training download Web browsers from the Internet without precaution, and demand that they be fast and easy to use. What can be done to make browsers secure while preserving their usability?
It is very easy to create a bad API and rather difficult to create a good one. Recent APIs implemented in modern programming languages make the same mistakes as their 20-year-old counterparts written in C. What can be done to get things right?
Lacking proper browser support, what steps can we take to debug production AJAX code?
The ecosystem of purpose-built languages is a key part of systems development.
Cybercrime 2.0: When the Cloud Turns Dark
Web-based malware attacks are more insidious than ever. What can be done to stem the tide?
Dynamic languages offer a taste of object-relational mapping that eases application code.
Smarter, more powerful scripting languages will improve game performance while making gameplay development more efficient.
Erlang For Concurrent Programming
Designed for concurrency from the ground up, the Erlang language can be a valuable tool to help solve concurrent problems.
Parallel Programming with Transactional Memory
While still primarily a research project, transactional memory shows promise for making parallel programming easier.
Improving Performance on the Internet
Given the Internet's bottlenecks, how can we build fast, scalable, content-delivery systems?
Building reliable distributed systems at a worldwide scale demands trade-offs between consistency and availability.
The sometimes contentious development of 64-bit systems shows how technology decisions can have unexpected, enduring consequences.
CTO Virtualization Roundtable: Part II
When it comes to virtualization platforms, experts say focus first on the services to be delivered.
Software Transactional Memory: Why Is It Only a Research Toy?
The promise of STM may likely be undermined by its overheads and workload applicabilities.
What does the proliferation of concurrency mean for the software you develop?
CTO Roundtable on Virtualization: Part I
Virtualization technology is hot again, but for the right reasons?
How do we apply the concept of resource orientation by designing representations to support interactions?
As the line between GPUs and CPUs begins to blur, it's important to understand what makes GPUs tick.
Shape the Future of Computing
ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.
Get InvolvedCommunications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.
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