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Web Applications Crave Memory
From BLOG@CACM

Web Applications Crave Memory

Big web applications are hungry for RAM.  They want lots of low power RAM.  And they want little else.

Successful Software Platforms Are the Byproducts of Successful Businesses
From BLOG@CACM

Successful Software Platforms Are the Byproducts of Successful Businesses

Startups need their current business to be successful and self-sustaining before they place serious effort in building a general software platform.

Consumerization of IT and Research
From BLOG@CACM

Consumerization of IT and Research

When a corporate, government, or university IT department of the 1970s debated an upgrade to its IBM S/370 mainframes, it is doubtful that the IT director was in...

How Much Software Testing Is Enough?
From BLOG@CACM

How Much Software Testing Is Enough?

Investing in a large amount of software testing can be difficult to justify, particularly for a startup company. How much software testing is enough?

Time Travel Is Now Possible
From BLOG@CACM

Time Travel Is Now Possible

I will be reporting on two of the sessions I attended this afternoon. One session was on analyzing interactions, which dealt primarily with methods for measuring...

Lessons Learned, or Not
From BLOG@CACM

Lessons Learned, or Not

Many of the techniques for better programming have been there for a long time.

What Will 2010 Bring?
From BLOG@CACM

What Will 2010 Bring?

What changes will we see in 2010 in computing?

SC09 Reflections: The Need For Speed
From BLOG@CACM

SC09 Reflections: The Need For Speed

SC09 (aka the “Supercomputing Conference”) was held during the week of November 16.  The conference set an attendance record this year – roughly 10,000 attendees...

Innovation = Good Idea + Implementation + Measurement
From BLOG@CACM

Innovation = Good Idea + Implementation + Measurement

We aspire to be innovative, but unless we are wiling to implement it and measure it its just another good idea.

Cray and Fernbach Award Winners
From BLOG@CACM

Cray and Fernbach Award Winners

This year, I have the honor and privilege to chair the selection committee for the Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach awards, which recognize outstanding contributions...

The Rise of Empirical Software Engineering (I): The Good News
From BLOG@CACM

The Rise of Empirical Software Engineering (I): The Good News

Empirical software engineering papers, at places like the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), used to be terrible. There were exceptions, of...

Frequent Releases Change Software Engineering
From BLOG@CACM

Frequent Releases Change Software Engineering

If you started deploying software much more frequently, how would it change your software development?

Is C All There Is?
From BLOG@CACM

Is C All There Is?

Increasingly, CS departments are moving to a programming language monoculture--it's C or C-derived languages throughout the curriculum.  What are we losing out...

The End of a DBMS Era (Might Be ­Upon ­Us)
From BLOG@CACM

The End of a DBMS Era (Might Be ­Upon ­Us)

Relational database management systems (DBMSs) have been remarkably successful in capturing the DBMS marketplace. To a first approximation they are “the only game...

HPC: Making a Small Fortune
From BLOG@CACM

HPC: Making a Small Fortune

There is an old joke in the high-performance computing community that begins with a question, “How do you make a small fortune in high-performance computing?” There...

High-Performance Computing: Where
From BLOG@CACM

High-Performance Computing: Where

By definition, the raison d’être for high-performance computing is high performance, but floating point operations per second (FLOPS) need not be the only measure...

When Petascale Is Just Too Slow
From BLOG@CACM

When Petascale Is Just Too Slow

Evolution or revolution, it’s the persistent question. Can we build reliable esascale systems from extrapolations of current technology or will new approaches be...

What Is a Good Recommendation Algorithm?
From BLOG@CACM

What Is a Good Recommendation Algorithm?

Someone may win the one million dollar Netflix Prize soon.  Will the winning algorithm produce movie recommendations that people like?

DBMSs For Science Applications: A Possible Solution
From BLOG@CACM

DBMSs For Science Applications: A Possible Solution

Quite a few scientists who deal with the processing and storage of large amounts of data are unhappy with relational DBMSs. Here are several reasons why—and a possible...

Google Android Authentication
From BLOG@CACM

Google Android Authentication

I recently saw a Google Android phone at HotMobile 2009 and was intrigued by the drawing-based authentication mechanism built in. Basically, there's a 3x3 grid...
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