Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
FastTrack: Efficient and Precise Dynamic Race Detection
Multithreaded programs are notoriously prone to race conditions. Prior work developed precise dynamic race detectors that never report false alarms. However, these...
From Communications of the ACM
Goldilocks: A Race-Aware Java Runtime
GOLDILOCKS is a Java runtime that monitors program executions and throws a DataRaceException when a data race...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Data Races Are Evil with No Exceptions
Exploiting parallelism has become the primary means to higher performance. Shared memory is a pervasively used programming...
From Communications of the ACM
Difference Engine: Harnessing Memory Redundancy in Virtual Machines
Virtual machine monitors are a popular platform for Internet hosting centers and cloud-based compute services. But main memory is not amenable to multiplexed hardware...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A VM 'Engine' That Makes a Difference
The past decade has witnessed a renaissance in server virtualization. Diwaker Gupta et al. present a novel approach for significantly improving the efficiency of...
From Communications of the ACM
Constraint Satisfaction Problems and Global Cardinality Constraints
In a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) the goal is to find an assignment of a given set of variables subject to specified constraints. A global cardinality...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Constraint Satisfaction Problems and Computational Complexity
It takes little imagination to come up with a wealth of problems in scheduling and planning that can be expressed asConstraint Satisfaction...
From Communications of the ACM
Reasoning About the Unknown in Static Analysis
Static program analysis techniques cannot know certain values, such as the value of user input or network state, at analysis...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Persepctive: Large-Scale Sound and Precise Program Analysis
You are given a program. Will it crash? Is it subject to a spoofing, buffer overflow, or injection attack? Is this part of...
From Communications of the ACM
X86-TSO: A Rigorous and Usable Programmer's Model For X86 Multiprocessors
Exploiting the multiprocessors that have recently become ubiquitous requires high-performance and reliable concurrent systems code. However, concurrent programming...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Solid Foundation For X86 Shared Memory
Multithreaded programs that communicate through shared memory are pervasive. Today they are the most obvious...
From Communications of the ACM
seL4: Formal Verification of an Operating-System Kernel
We report on the formal, machine-checked verification of the seL4 microkernel from an abstract specification down to its C implementation. We assume correctness...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Learning To Do Program Verification
When you decide to use a piece of software, how do you know it will do what you need it to do? Will it be safe to run? Will it interfere...
From Communications of the ACM
Asserting and Checking Determinism For Multithreaded Programs
The trend towards processors with more and more parallel cores is increasing the need for software that can take advantage of...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Building Confidence in Multicore Software
Surprises may be fun in real life, but not so in software. One approach to avoiding surprises in software is to establish its...
From Communications of the ACM
Automatic Program Repair With Evolutionary Computation
There are many methods for detecting and mitigating software errors but few generic methods for automatically repairing errors once they are discovered. Recent...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Automated Patching Techniques: The Fix Is In
Finding bugs is technically demanding and yet economically vital. How much more difficult yet valuable would it be to...
From Communications of the ACM
Censored Exploration and the Dark Pool Problem
The success and proliferation of dark pool stock exchanges have created challenging and interesting problems in algorithmic trading—in particular, the problem of...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Learning to Act in Uncertain Environments
The problem of decision making in an uncertain environment arises in many diverse contexts. The key issue in effectively solving problems like this is known as...
From Communications of the ACM