Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
GPU Ray Tracing
The NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine builds on the key observation that most ray tracing algorithms can be implemented using a small set of programmable operations...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Video Quality Assessment in the Age of Internet Video
With video delivery, it appears that once again "the Internet changes everything." In this changed environment, what measures of quality are most relevant, and...
From Communications of the ACM
Understanding the Impact of Video Quality on User Engagement
As Internet-based videos become mainstream, user expectation for high quality is constantly increasing. In this context, it is crucial for content providers to...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Is Dark Silicon Real?
The microprocessor chip R&D community has been well aware of the so-called "power wall" challenge for over a decade. The following work by Esmaeilzadeh et al. is...
From Communications of the ACM
Power Challenges May End the Multicore Era
Tthe microprocessor industry has shifted to multicore scaling as its principal strategy for continuing performance growth. However, while transistor count increases...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: High-Level Data Structures
This lifting of data structure thinking to the relational level has long inspired computer scientists. In "An Introduction to Data Representation Synthesis," the...
From Communications of the ACM
An Introduction to Data Representation Synthesis
We consider the problem of specifying combinations of data structures with complex sharing in a manner that is declarative and results in provably correct code.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Realities of Home Broadband
Buying residential broadband services seems relatively simple: pick among a small number of plans, and then compare similar plans by price. Unfortunately, reality...
From Communications of the ACM
Measuring Home Broadband Performance
We present the results from the first study of Internet access link performance measured directly from home routers. Our findings provide a snapshot of access network...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Example-Driven Program Synthesis For End-User Programming
As information technology has come to permeate our society, broader classes of users have developed the need for more sophisticated data manipulation and processing...
From Communications of the ACM
Spreadsheet Data Manipulation Using Examples
Millions of computer end users need to perform tasks over large spreadsheet data, yet lack the programming knowledge to do such tasks automatically. We present...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: For Better or Worse, Benchmarks Shape a Field
Like other IT fields, computer architects initially reported incomparable results. We quickly saw the folly of this approach. We then went through a sequence...
From Communications of the ACM
Looking Back and Looking Forward: Power, Performance, and Upheaval
The past 10 years have delivered two significant revolutions. Microprocessor design has been transformed — leading to multicore processors. And an entirely new...
From Communications of the ACM
Lightweight Modular Staging: A Pragmatic Approach to Runtime Code Generation and Compiled DSLs
Good software engineering practice demands generalization and abstraction, whereas high performance demands specialization and concretization. These goals are at...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Fox and the Hedgehog
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Philosophers have used this line, attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, to capture...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: An Experiment in Determinism
It is widely held that parallel programming is far more difficult and error prone than writing sequential code. In particular, the myriad allowable interleavings...
From Communications of the ACM
Efficient System-Enforced Deterministic Parallelism
We introduce a new parallel programming model addressing the issues facing current methods of executing parallel programs deterministically, and use Determinator...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Best Algorithms + Best Computers = Powerful Match
Say you want to simulate the motion over time of the stars in a galaxy to learn about how galaxies formed and why the universe appears as it does. Is it feasible...
From Communications of the ACM
A Massively Parallel Adaptive Fast Multipole Method on Heterogeneous Architectures
We describe a parallel fast multipole method for highly nonuniform distributions of particles. We employ both distributed memory parallelism and shared memory parallelism...
From Communications of the ACM