DNS

Vol. 7 No. 10 – November 2009

DNS

What DNS Is Not:
DNS is many things to many people - perhaps too many things to too many people.

DNS (Domain Name System) is a hierarchical, distributed, autonomous, reliable database. The first and only of its kind, it offers realtime performance levels to a global audience with global contributors. Every TCP/IP traffic flow including every World Wide Web page view begins with at least one DNS transaction. DNS is, in a word, glorious.

by Paul Vixie

Other People’s Data:
Companies have access to more types of external data than ever before. How can they integrate it most effectively?

Every organization bases some of its critical decisions on external data sources. In addition to traditional flat file data feeds, Web services and Web pages are playing an increasingly important role in data warehousing. The growth of Web services has made data feeds easily consumable at the departmental and even end-user levels. There are now more than 1,500 publicly available Web services and thousands of data mashups ranging from retail sales data to weather information to United States census data. These mashups are evidence that when users need information, they will find a way to get it. An effective enterprise information management strategy needs to take into account both internal and external data.

by Stephen Petschulat

Maximizing Power Efficiency with Asymmetric Multicore Systems:
Asymmetric multicore systems promise to use a lot less energy than conventional symmetric processors. How can we develop software that makes the most out of this potential?

In computing systems, a CPU is usually one of the largest consumers of energy. For this reason, reducing CPU power consumption has been a hot topic in the past few years in both the academic community and the industry. In the quest to create more power-efficient CPUs, several researchers have proposed an asymmetric multicore architecture that promises to save a significant amount of power while delivering similar performance to conventional symmetric multicore processors.

by Alexandra Fedorova, Juan Carlos Saez, Daniel Shelepov, Manuel Prieto