acm - an acm publication

Ted G. Lewis Collection

  • Sustainable computing

    Energy consumption by computers is expanding exponentially along with big data and AI processing. The trend can be broken by adopting alternate approaches to CPU and GPU design. Specifically, Adiabatic Reversible Logic (ARL) has been proposed as the solution. This essay surveys the technology of ARL and gives early examples of actual reversible machines.

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  • P2P networks are inherently unstable

    The P2P technology underlying file-sharing systems like Gnutella and distributed autonomous organizations like blockchain are inherently unstable because of self-organizing processes akin to Gause's competitive exclusion principle, and preferential attachment. To maintain an egalitarian P2P organization it is necessary to conserve the original network's entropy, defined as the random structure of the network and actions among peers.

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  • Art Scott and Michael Frank on energy-efficient computing

    Clock speeds of computing chips have leveled off dramatically since 2005, and putting more cores in systems on a chip (SoC) has produced more heat, adding a new ceiling to further advances. Leading-edge researchers, like Mike Frank, and dedicated technologists with a wealth of experience, like Art Scott, represent a new vanguard of the leap-forward beyond Dennard scaling and Landauer's limit. Art looks for ways to reduce energy consumption and Mike looks for ways to "architect" future chips according to principles of reversibility. Is the future in reversible, adiabatic computing and simpler architectures using posit arithmetic? My guests think so.

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  • Cybersecurity skeptics now embracing formal methods: an interview with Gernot Heiser and Jim Morris

    There is new hope for those who despair securing computer systems from external hackers. The recent DARPA HACMS project demonstrated conclusively that "certain pathways for attackers have all been shut down in a way that's mathematically proven to be unhackable for those pathways." Continuing research at DARPA and IARPA will eventually shut down all the pathways, and the external hackers will be out of business permanently.

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