The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, reporting nearly 110,000 student and professional members as of 2022. Its headquarters are in New York City.
In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector attempts to reclaim memory that was allocated by the program, but is no longer referenced; such memory is called garbage. Garbage collection was invented by American computer scientist John McCarthy around 1959 to simplify manual memory management in Lisp.
In computer science, reference counting is a programming technique of storing the number of references, pointers, or handles to a resource, such as an object, a block of memory, disk space, and others.
In computer science, an algorithm is called non-blocking if failure or suspension of any thread cannot cause failure or suspension of another thread; for some operations, these algorithms provide a useful alternative to traditional blocking implementations. A non-blocking algorithm is lock-free if there is guaranteed system-wide progress, and wait-free if there is also guaranteed per-thread progress. "Non-blocking" was used as a synonym for "lock-free" in the literature until the introduction of obstruction-freedom in 2003.
In computing, a parallel programming model is an abstraction of parallel computer architecture, with which it is convenient to express algorithms and their composition in programs. The value of a programming model can be judged on its generality: how well a range of different problems can be expressed for a variety of different architectures, and its performance: how efficiently the compiled programs can execute. The implementation of a parallel programming model can take the form of a library invoked from a programming language, as an extension to an existing languages.
The International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium is an annual conference for engineers and scientists to present recent findings in the fields of parallel processing and distributed computing. In addition to technical sessions of submitted paper presentations, the meeting offers workshops, tutorials, and commercial presentations & exhibits. IPDPS is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Parallel Processing.
ACM SIGACT or SIGACT is the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory, whose purpose is support of research in theoretical computer science. It was founded in 1968 by Patrick C. Fischer.
Thread Level Speculation (TLS), also known as Speculative Multi-threading, or Speculative Parallelization, is a technique to speculatively execute a section of computer code that is anticipated to be executed later in parallel with the normal execution on a separate independent thread. Such a speculative thread may need to make assumptions about the values of input variables. If these prove to be invalid, then the portions of the speculative thread that rely on these input variables will need to be discarded and squashed. If the assumptions are correct the program can complete in a shorter time provided the thread was able to be scheduled efficiently.
In computer science, a mark–compact algorithm is a type of garbage collection algorithm used to reclaim unreachable memory. Mark–compact algorithms can be regarded as a combination of the mark–sweep algorithm and Cheney's copying algorithm. First, reachable objects are marked, then a compacting step relocates the reachable (marked) objects towards the beginning of the heap area. Compacting garbage collection is used by modern JVMs, Microsoft's Common Language Runtime and by the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.
The ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) is an academic conference in the field of distributed computing organised annually by the Association for Computing Machinery.
Uzi Vishkin is a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). Uzi Vishkin is known for his work in the field of parallel computing. In 1996, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, with the following citation: "One of the pioneers of parallel algorithms research, Dr. Vishkin's seminal contributions played a leading role in forming and shaping what thinking in parallel has come to mean in the fundamental theory of Computer Science."
Nir Shavit is an Israeli computer scientist. He is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Tel Aviv University and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A distributed operating system is system software over a collection of independent software, networked, communicating, and physically separate computational nodes. They handle jobs which are serviced by multiple CPUs. Each individual node holds a specific software subset of the global aggregate operating system. Each subset is a composite of two distinct service provisioners. The first is a ubiquitous minimal kernel, or microkernel, that directly controls that node's hardware. Second is a higher-level collection of system management components that coordinate the node's individual and collaborative activities. These components abstract microkernel functions and support user applications.
The International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM) is an ACM SIGPLAN symposium on memory management. In French, it is known as Institut des Sciences de Maçon Multitasking. Before becoming a conference it was known as the International Workshop on Memory Management (IWMM).
Kathryn S. McKinley is an American computer scientist noted for her research on compilers, runtime systems, and computer architecture. She is also known for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. McKinley was co-chair of CRA-W from 2011 to 2014.
ACM SIGARCH is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on computer architecture, a community of computer professionals and students from academia and industry involved in research and professional practice related to computer architecture and design. The organization sponsors many prestigious international conferences in this area, including the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), recognized as the top conference in this area since 1975. Together with IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA), it is one of the two main professional organizations for people working in computer architecture.
ACM SIGOPS is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Operating Systems, an international community of students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners associated with research and development related to operating systems. The organization sponsors international conferences related to computer systems, operating systems, computer architectures, distributed computing, and virtual environments. In addition, the organization offers multiple awards recognizing outstanding participants in the field, including the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award, in honor of Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of the C programming language and Unix operating system.
