05/2012
VOL. 55 NO. 05
Practice
50 Managing Technical Debt
Shortcuts that save money and time
today can cost you down the road.
By Eric Allman
56 Idempotence Is Not
a Medical Condition
Messages may be retried.
Idempotence means that’s OK.
By Pat Helland
66 Your Mouse Is a Database
Web and mobile applications
are increasingly composed of
asynchronous and real-time
streaming services and push
notifications.
By Erik Meijer
Articles’ development led by
queue.acm.org
illUStration by gary neill, PhotograPh by Jonathan raShad
About the Cover:
great strides have
been made in the study
of proteins—a key to
unlocking the workings
of a cell. our cover story
(p. 88) examines the
problems and practical
solutions of comparative
analysis of protein
networks. this month’s
cover was inspired by the
interactive visualization of
proteins from the Protein
data bank performed by
researchers from the University of california, San diego.
illustration by James gary.
Contributed Articles
74 Social Media Evolution
of the Egyptian Revolution
Twitter sentiment was revealed,
along with popularity of
Egypt-related subjects and tweeter
influence on the 2011 revolution.
By Alok Choudhary, William Hendrix,
Kathy Lee, Diana Palsetia,
and Wei-keng Liao
81 An n-Gram Analysis of
Communications 2000–2010
Applied to almost 3,500 articles
it reveals computing’s
(and Communications’) culture,
identity, and evolution.
By Daniel S. Soper and Ofir Turel
Review Articles
88 Comparative Analysis of
Protein Networks: Hard Problems,
Practical Solutions
Examining tools that provide
valuable insight about molecular
components within a cell.
By Nir Atias and Roded Sharan
Research Highlights
100 Technical Perspective
Best Algorithms + Best Computers
= Powerful Match
By William Gropp
101 A Massively Parallel Adaptive
Fast Multipole Method on
Heterogeneous Architectures
By Ilya Lashuk,
Aparna Chandramowlishwaran,
Harper Langston, Tuan-Anh Nguyen,
Rahul Sampath, Aashay Shringarpure,
Richard Vuduc, Lexing Ying,
Denis Zorin, and George Biros
110 Technical Perspective
An Experiment in Determinism
By Steven Hand
111 Efficient System-Enforced
Deterministic Parallelism
By Amittai Aviram, Shu-Chun Weng,
Sen Hu, and Bryan Ford
Association for Computing Machinery
Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession
