Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Proving File Systems Meet Expectations
"Certifying a File System Using Crash Hoare Logic: Correctness in the Presence of Crashes" presents a big step toward real-world file systems that are crash-safe...
From Communications of the ACM
Certifying a File System Using Crash Hoare Logic: Correctness in the Presence of Crashes
This paper introduces Crash Hoare logic, which extends traditional Hoare logic with a crash condition, a recovery procedure, and logical address spaces for specifying...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Data Distribution For Fast Joins
What is the most drastic way to reduce the cost of communication for parallel data processing algorithms? This is the question studied in "Reasoning on Data Partitioning...
From Communications of the ACM
Reasoning on Data Partitioning For Single-Round Multi-Join Evaluation in Massively Parallel Systems
We introduce a framework for reasoning about data partitioning to detect when we can avoid the data reshuffling step.
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: 3D Image Editing Made Easy
The authors of "Extracting 3D Objects from Photographs Using 3-Sweep" present an important step toward achieving 3D editing.
From Communications of the ACM
Extracting 3D Objects from Photographs Using 3-Sweep
We introduce an interactive technique to extract and manipulate simple 3D shapes in a single photograph.
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