• DOI:10.1145/3447786.3456228
• Corpus ID: 220647517

PaSh: light-touch data-parallel shell processing

@article{Vasilakis2021PaShLD,
  title={PaSh: light-touch data-parallel shell processing},
  author={Nikos Vasilakis and Konstantinos Kallas and Konstantinos Mamouras and Achilleas Benetopoulos and Lazar Cvetkovich},
  journal={Proceedings of the Sixteenth European Conference on Computer Systems},
  year={2021}
}

• N. Vasilakis, Konstantinos Kallas, +2 authors Lazar Cvetkovich
• Published 18 July 2020
• Computer Science
• Proceedings of the Sixteenth European Conference on Computer Systems

This paper presents PaSh, a system for parallelizing POSIX shell scripts. Given a script, PaSh converts it to a dataflow graph, performs a series of semantics-preserving program transformations that expose parallelism, and then converts the dataflow graph back into a script---one that adds POSIX constructs to explicitly guide parallelism coupled with PaSh-provided Unix-aware runtime primitives for addressing performance- and correctness-related issues. A lightweight annotation language allows command developers to express key parallelizability properties about their commands. An accompanying parallelizability study of POSIX and GNU commands---two large and commonly used groups---guides the annotation language and optimized aggregator library that PaSh uses. PaSh's extensive evaluation over 44 unmodified Unix scripts shows significant speedups (0.89--61.1×, avg: 6.7×) stemming from the combination of its program transformations and runtime primitives.