Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Cleaning Up Flaws in TLS Implementations
One unfortunate fact about protocols is that as they get older and applied to more scenarios — and TLS is used basically everywhere — they tend to gain weight....
From Communications of the ACM
A Messy State of the Union: Taming the Composite State Machines of TLS
We systematically test popular TLS implementations and find unexpected transitions in many of their state machines that have stayed hidden for years. We show how...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Mapping the Universe
"HACC: Extreme Scaling and Performance Across Diverse Architectures" describes the Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC) framework, which uses a novel...
From Communications of the ACM
HACC: Extreme Scaling and Performance Across Diverse Architectures
In this Research Highlight, we demonstrate the success of HACC on two very different machines, the CPU/GPU system Titan and the BG/Q systems Sequoia and Mira, attaining...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Chemistry of Software-Defined Batteries
A time-tested principle in computer systems design is to use an interface to separate an abstraction from its implementation. "Software-Defined Batteries" represents...
From Communications of the ACM
Software-Defined Batteries
In this paper, we present a new hardware-software system, called Software Defined Battery, which allows system designers to integrate batteries of different chemistries...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: FPGA Compute Acceleration Is First About Energy Efficiency
"A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large-Scale Datacenter Services" presents a research deployment of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in a Microsoft...
From Communications of the ACM
A Reconfigurable Fabric For Accelerating Large-Scale Datacenter Services
We describe a medium-scale deployment of a composable, reconfigurable hardware fabric on a bed of 1,632 servers, and measure its effectiveness in accelerating the...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Power of Parallelizing Computations
"Efficient Parallelization Using Rank Convergence in Dynamic Programming Algorithms" shows how some instances of dynamic programming can be effectively parallelized...
From Communications of the ACM
Efficient Parallelization Using Rank Convergence in Dynamic Programming Algorithms
This paper proposes an efficient parallel algorithm for an important class of dynamic programming problems that includes Viterbi, Needleman-Wunsch, Smith-Waterman...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Naiad
"Incremental, Iterative Data Processing with Timely Dataflow" describes Naiad, which combines three classes of dataflow systems, supporting high-throughput batch...
From Communications of the ACM
Incremental, Iterative Data Processing with Timely Dataflow
We describe the timely dataflow model for distributed computation and its implementation in the Naiad system.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Jupiter Rising
As "Jupiter Rising" makes clear, many of the Internet mechanisms for maintaining large-scale networks are suboptimal when the datacenter is largely homogeneous,...
From Communications of the ACM
Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google's Datacenter Network
We present our approach for overcoming the cost, operational complexity, and limited scale endemic to datacenter networks a decade ago.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Toward Reliable Programming For Unreliable Hardware
"Verifying Quantitative Reliability for Programs that Execute on Unreliable Hardware" by Carbin et al. addresses challenges related to a bug, how likely it is to...
From Communications of the ACM
Verifying Quantitative Reliability For Programs that Execute on Unreliable Hardware
We present Rely, a programming language that enables developers to reason about the quantitative reliability of an application — namely, the probability that it...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Why Didn't I Think of That?
Until now, the database in a Web application has been treated as a global variable, accessible to all. In "Ur/Web: A Simple Model for Programming the Web," Adam...
From Communications of the ACM
Ur/Web: A Simple Model For Programming the Web
This paper presents Ur/Web, a domain-specific, statically typed functional programming language that reduces the nest of Web standards for modern Web applications...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Mesa Takes Data Warehousing to New Heights
Producing reports at the scale of Google Ads, where billions of clicks happen per day, is the challenge addressed by the Mesa system described in "Mesa: A Geo-Replicated...
From Communications of the ACM