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Cooling the Data Center
From Communications of the ACM

Cooling the Data Center

What can be done to make cooling systems in data centers more energy efficient?

Toward Energy-Efficient Computing
From Communications of the ACM

Toward Energy-Efficient Computing

What will it take to make server-side computing more energy efficient?

Managing Contention For Shared Resources on Multicore Processors
From Communications of the ACM

Managing Contention For Shared Resources on Multicore Processors

Contention for caches, memory controllers, and interconnects can be eased by contention-aware scheduling algorithms.

Power-Efficient Software
From Communications of the ACM

Power-Efficient Software

Power-manageable hardware can help save energy, but what can software developers do to address the problem?

Triple-Parity RAID and Beyond
From Communications of the ACM

Triple-Parity RAID and Beyond

As hard-drive capacities continue to outpace their throughput, the time has come for a new level of RAID.

Maximizing Power Efficiency with Asymmetric Multicore Systems
From Communications of the ACM

Maximizing Power Efficiency with Asymmetric Multicore Systems

How do we develop software to make the most of the promise that asymmetric multicore systems use a lot less energy?

What DNS Is Not
From Communications of the ACM

What DNS Is Not

DNS is many things to many people — perhaps too many things to too many people.

A Threat Analysis of RFID Passports
From Communications of the ACM

A Threat Analysis of RFID Passports

An RFID-passport attack is more plausible than skimming RFID information. Do RFID passports make us vulnerable to identity theft?

Four Billion Little Brothers?
From Communications of the ACM

Four Billion Little Brothers?: Privacy, Mobile Phones, and Ubiquitous Data Collection

Participatory sensing technologies could improve our lives and our communities, but at what cost to our privacy?

A Conversation with David E. Shaw
From Communications of the ACM

A Conversation with David E. Shaw

Stanford professor Pat Hanrahan sits down with the noted hedge fund founder, computational biochemist, and (above all) computer scientist.

Probing Biomolecular Machines with Graphics Processors
From Communications of the ACM

Probing Biomolecular Machines with Graphics Processors

GPU acceleration and other computer performance increases will offer critical benefits to biomedical science.

Making Sense of Revision-Control Systems
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?

Monitoring and Control of Large Systems With MonALISA
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.

CTO Roundtable
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?

Fighting Physics: A Tough Battle
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.

Whither Sockets?
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...

Network Front-End Processors, Yet Again
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.

Hard-Disk Drives: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
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.

Improving Performance on the Internet
From Communications of the ACM

Improving Performance on the Internet

Given the Internet's bottlenecks, how can we build fast, scalable, content-delivery systems?

The Long Road to 64 Bits
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.
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