Communications of the ACM
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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
Exact Matrix Completion via Convex Optimization
Suppose that one observes an incomplete subset of entries selected from a low-rank matrix. When is it possible to complete the matrix and recover the entries that...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Reconstructing the Unknown, Balancing Structure and Uncertainty
The problem of estimating or reconstructing an unknown structured object from incomplete, partial, noisy measurements is a fundamental one in scientific and technological...
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
Technical Perspective: The Benefits of Capability-Based Protection
Affordable personal computing hardware and the usable GUI-based PC operating systems made the vision of "a computer on every desktop and in every home" a reality...
From Communications of the ACM
A Taste of Capsicum: Practical Capabilities For Unix
Capsicum is a lightweight operating system capability and sandbox framework planned for inclusion in FreeBSD 9. Capsicum extends, rather than replaces, UNIX APIs...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Compiling What to How
The following paper by Viktor Kuncak et al. integrates declarative programming into a general-purpose language, allowing one to escape the host language when...
From Communications of the ACM
Software Synthesis Procedures
Automated synthesis of program fragments from specifications can make programs easier to write and easier to reason about. To integrate synthesis into programming...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Content-Centric Networking
Much has changed in the 50 years since the invention of packet switching and the early network designs and deployments that...
From Communications of the ACM
Networking Named Content
Current network use is dominated by content distribution and retrieval yet current networking protocols are designed for conversations between hosts. We present...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Safety First!
Software misbehaves all too often. This is a truism, but also the driving force behind many computing techniques intended to increase software reliability, safety...
From Communications of the ACM
Safe to the Last Instruction: Automated Verification of a Type-Safe Operating System
High-level computer applications build on services provided by lower-level software layers. Unfortunately, today's low-level software still suffers from a steady...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Making Untrusted Code Useful
The following paper combines two important themes in secure computing: assurance and information flow control. For high assurance, a system's Trusted Computing...
From Communications of the ACM
Making Information Flow Explicit in HiStar
Features of the new HiStar operating system permit several novel applications, including privacy-preserving, untrusted virus scanners and a dynamic Web server with...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Power Efficiency as the #1 Design Constraint
Moore's Law, and associated observations by Bob Dennard, describe key technical...
From Communications of the ACM
Understanding Sources of Ineffciency in General-Purpose Chips
To better understand what improvement in processor efficiency is possible, we quantify the performance and energy overheads of a 720p HD H.264 encoder running on...
From Communications of the ACM