ACM Transactions on Computer Systems articles

Recent articles from ACM Transactions on Computer Systems

Accelerating Shared Virtual Memory via General-Purpose Network Interface Support.
February 1, 2001... 1. INTRODUCTION As clusters of workstations, PCs, or symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs) become important platforms for parallel computing, there is increasing interest in supporting the attractive, shared-address-space (SAS) programming model across them in software. Supporting a...

Separating Access Control Policy, Enforcement, and Functionality in Extensible Systems.
February 1, 2001... 1. INTRODUCTION Extensible systems, such as SPIN [Bershad et al. 1995] or Java [Gosling et al. 1996; Lindholm and Yellin 1996], promise more power and flexibility than traditional systems and enable new applications such as smart clients [Yoshikawa et al. 1997] or active networks [Smith...

Architectural and Compiler Support for Effective Instruction Prefetching: A Cooperative Approach.
February 1, 2001... 1. INTRODUCTION The latency of fetching instructions is a key performance bottleneck in modern systems, and the problem is expected to get worse as the gap between processor and memory speeds continues to grow. While instruction caches are a crucial first step, they are not a complete...

Hint-Based Cooperative Caching.
November 1, 2000... 1. INTRODUCTION Caching is an essential feature of distributed file systems because it filters out accesses to the slower layers of the storage hierarchy [Howard et al. 1988; Nelson et al. 1993; Sandberg et al. 1985]. File accesses that hit in the local client cache avoid network accesses...

Java Consistency: Nonoperational Characterizations for Java Memory Behavior.
November 1, 2000... 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background One of the interesting and useful features of Java is its built-in concurrency support through multithreading. Multithreading can be exploited for many purposes [Lea 1996]. Programs can use it to improve the responsiveness of applications, or to achieve...