Communications of the ACM
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From Communications of the ACM
Making Sense of Revision-Control Systems
All revision-control systems come with complicated sets of trade-offs. How do you find the best match between tool and team?
From Communications of the ACM
Monitoring and Control of Large Systems With MonALISA
MonALISA developers describe how it works, the key design principles behind it, and the biggest technical challenges in building it.
From Communications of the ACM
CTO Roundtable: Cloud Computing
The age of cloud computing has begun. How can companies take advantage of the new opportunities it provides?
From Communications of the ACM
Fighting Physics: A Tough Battle
The laws of physics and the Internet's routing infrastructure affect performance in a big way.
From Communications of the ACM
Whither Sockets?
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...
From Communications of the ACM
Network Front-End Processors, Yet Again
The history of NFE processors sheds light on the trade-offs involved in designing network stack software.
From Communications of the ACM
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.
From Communications of the ACM
Improving Performance on the Internet
Given the Internet's bottlenecks, how can we build fast, scalable, content-delivery systems?
From Communications of the ACM
The Long Road to 64 Bits
The sometimes contentious development of 64-bit systems shows how technology decisions can have unexpected, enduring consequences.
From Communications of the ACM
Eventually Consistent
Building reliable distributed systems at a worldwide scale demands trade-offs between consistency and availability.
From Communications of the ACM
High-Performance Web Sites
Want to make your Web site fly? Focus on frontend performance.
From Communications of the ACM
CTO Virtualization Roundtable: Part II
When it comes to virtualization platforms, experts say focus first on the services to be delivered.
From Communications of the ACM
CTO Roundtable on Virtualization: Part I
Virtualization technology is hot again, but for the right reasons?
From Communications of the ACM
A Closer Look at GPUs
As the line between GPUs and CPUs begins to blur, it's important to understand what makes GPUs tick.
From Communications of the ACM
Powering Down
Smart power management is all about doing more with the resources we have.
From Communications of the ACM
CTO Storage Roundtable, Part Two
Leaders in the storage industry ponder upcoming technologies and trends.
From Communications of the ACM
The Rise and Fall of CORBA
There's a lot we can learn from CORBA's mistakes.
From Communications of the ACM