Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
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: 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: Computing with the Crowd
What kinds of problems can be solved with combined human and machine computation? "AutoMan: A Platform for Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation," by...
From Communications of the ACM
Automan: A Platform For Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation
We introduce AutoMan, the first fully automatic crowdprogramming system.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Veritesting Tackles Path-Explosion Problem
"Enhancing Symbolic Execution with Veritesting" by Avgerinos et al. proposes an effective technique called veritesting that addresses the scalability limitations...
From Communications of the ACM
Enhancing Symbolic Execution with Veritesting
In this article, we present a new technique for generating formulas called veritesting that alternates between static symbolic execution (SSE) and dynamic symbolic...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Breakthrough in Software Obfuscation
In "Hiding Secrets in Software," Garg et al. construct a "one-way compiler" of the type envisioned by Diffie and Hellman.
From Communications of the ACM
Hiding Secrets in Software: A Cryptographic Approach to Program Obfuscation
Can we hide secrets in software? Can we make programs unintelligible while preserving their functionality? Why would we even want to do this? In this article, we...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Software Is Natural
"On the Naturalness of Software" by Hindle et al. takes an entirely new approach to providing tools to help build software.
From Communications of the ACM