Practical Research Yields Fundamental Insight, Too
Tim Wu's viewpoint "Bell Labs and Centralized Innovation" (May 2011) was inaccurate regarding a specific example of research at Bell Labs.
Software Engineering and Programming Languages
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Jeannette M. Wing discusses peer review and its importance in terms of public trust. Ed H. Chi writes about alternatives, such as open peer commentary.
Focusing on socio-technical design with values as a critical component in the design process.
Workload Management For Power Efficiency in Virtualized Data Centers
Power-aware dynamic application placement can address underutilization of servers as well as the rising energy costs in a data center.
FAWN: A Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes
This paper presents a fast array of wimpy nodes — FAWN — an approach for achieving low-power data-intensive data-center computing.
Technical Perspective: Is Scale Your Enemy, Or Is Scale Your Friend?
Scale has been the single most important force driving changes in system software over the last decade. Its impact is most obvious in the Web arena, however, it also impacts developers outside the Web. In this paper, scale comes from the large installed base of Windows and the correspondingly large number of error reports emanating from the installed base.
Technical Perspective: FAWN: A Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes
The emergence of wimpy processors and FLASH met a promising deployment scenario in the field of large-scale data centers. The energy efficiency potential of these technologies could lower the costs of warehouse-scale computing systems. Given this potential, how can we explain the rather slow pace of adoption of these technologies?
ACM Aggregates Publication Statistics in the ACM Digital Library
It is now possible to click on any author's name inside the ACM Digital Library and view a complete record of that author's publication history. Currently, over one million author pages exist in the DL, and this figure grows every day!
Driving Power in Global Supply Chains
Supply chains are increasingly global. We pour energy into managing them efficiently, with their risks and rewards. Yet we do not know enough about how profits are divided and distributed along a global chain that changes over time. This is a question worth posing.
Microsoft’s Protocol Documentation Program: Interoperability Testing at Scale
A discussion with Nico Kicillof, Wolfgang Grieskamp, and Bob Binder.
Passing a Language Through the Eye of a Needle
How the embeddability of Lua impacted its design.
Five Tips For Agile Software Development
The most critical challenge for practitioners of agile software development is learning how to become a self-organizing, cross-functional agile team.
Why Don’t Languages Support Multimedia All the Way Down?
It's a hallmark of CS thinking, to be able to shift levels of abstraction down to the bytes. Why do programming languages make this so hard to teach students?
How Much Spam Does Your Company nknowingly Send?
SpamRankings.net uses "name and shame" to publicize organizations that are infected by spam bots.
Research in Agile Development Practices
Recent research in Agile development practices has identified that self-organizing teams spontaneously assume some previously unclassified roles and practices to make themselves successful.
New SQL: An Alternative to NoSQL and Old SQL For New OLTP Apps
New SQL should be considered as an alternative to NoSQL or Old SQL for New OLTP applications. If New OLTP is as big a market as I foresee, we will see many more New SQL engines employing a variety of architectures in the near future.
Long Live Incremental Research!
“Break through!” clamor the funding agencies, which scorn “incremental” research. Sure, every human being needs hype; in truth, though, almost all research—good research included—is incremental.
All the News That’s Fit For You
Personalized news promises to make daily journalism profitable again, but technical and cultural obstacles have slowed the industry's adoption of automated personalization.
M. Frans Kaashoek discusses systems work, "undo computing," and what he learned from Andrew S. Tanenbaum.
From Polynomial Time Queries to Graph Structure Theory
We give a logical characterization of the polynomial-time properties of graphs with excluded minors.
Technical Perspective: The Quest For a Logic For Polynomial-Time Computation
The interaction between computation and logic goes back to the beginnings of computer science with the development of computability theory in the 1930s. In recent decades, the interaction between computation and logic has spanned the spectrum of computer science.
Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets
Dremel is a scalable, interactive ad hoc query system for analysis of read-only nested data. By combining multilevel execution trees and columnar data layout, it is capable of running aggregation queries over trillion-row tables in seconds.
The Risks of Stopping Too Soon
Good software design is never easy, but stopping too soon makes the job more difficult.
Shape the Future of Computing
ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.
Get InvolvedCommunications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.
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