Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Strange Effects in High Dimension
In studying the genetic basis of a disease, it is now common to select a set of relevant genes G, and to measure how strongly...
From Communications of the ACM
Native Client: A Sandbox For Portable, -Untrusted X86 Native Code
Native Client is a sandbox for untrusted x86 native code. It aims to give browser-based applications the computational performance of native applications without...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Native Client: A Clever Alternative
Google's Native Client is an intriguing new system that allows untrusted x86 binaries to run safely on bare metal.
From Communications of the ACM
Designing Plush Toys With a Computer
We introduce Plushie, an interactive system that allows nonprofessional users to design their own original plush toys. We successfully demonstrated that nonprofessional...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Design Tools For the Rest of Us
There are many who believe we are on the verge of the biggest change in the way products are made since the Industrial...
From Communications of the ACM
Optimistic Parallelism Requires Abstractions
Writing software for multicore processors is greatly simplified if we could automatically parallelize sequential programs. Although auto-parallelization has been...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Abstraction For Parallelism
Looking for some new insight into an old problem? The familiar problem of writing parallel applications and a...
From Communications of the ACM
Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality?: An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista
Existing literature on distributed development in software engineering and other fields discusses various challenges,...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Maintaining Quality in the Face of Distributed Development
It was a problem that should not have taken three weeks to solve. The documentation claimed that if a function was called...
From Communications of the ACM
Formal Verification of a Realistic Compiler
This paper reports on the development and formal verification of CompCert, a compiler from Clight (a large subset of the C programming language) to PowerPC assembly...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Compiler's Story
In the early 1970s, pioneers like Floyd, Dijkstra, and Hoare argued that programs should be formally specified and proven...
From Communications of the ACM
Apprenticeship Learning For Helicopter Control
Autonomous helicopter flight is widely regarded to be a highly challenging control problem. As helicopters are highly unstable and exhibit complicated dynamical...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Ultimate Pilot Program
In one scene from The Matrix, two leaders of the human resistance are trapped on the roof of a skyscraper. The only means of escape is by helicopter, which neither...
From Communications of the ACM
Scalable Synchronous Queues
In a thread-safe concurrent queue, consumers typically wait for producers to make data available. In a synchronous queue, producers similarly wait for consumers...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Highly Concurrent Data Structures
The advent of multicore architectures has produced a Renaissance in the study of highly concurrent data structures.
From Communications of the ACM
Lest We Remember: Cold-Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys
DRAM retains its contents for several seconds after power is lost. Although DRAM becomes less reliable when it is not refreshed, it is not immediately erased, and...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Chilly Sense of Security
Many systems rely on keeping a master key secret. But technological progress can undermine old assumptions.
From Communications of the ACM
Integrating Nand Flash Devices Onto Servers
In this paper, we examine the use of Flash storage in the server domain. Wear-out has the potential to limit the use of Flash in this domain. To seriously consider...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Integrating Flash Devices
Flash memory nowadays seems to be in every discussion about system architecture. Sure enough, flash memory boasts...
From Communications of the ACM