Scientists have produced a procedure that boosts the speeds of packages that run in the Unix shell, a ubiquitous programming environment made 50 years in the past, by parallelizing the packages. Credit rating: Christine Daniloff, MIT
Computer system researchers developed a new system that can make laptop or computer plans run quicker, when guaranteeing
Their system boosts the speeds of programs that run in the Unix shell, a ubiquitous programming environment created 50 years ago that is still widely used today. Their method parallelizes these programs, which means that it splits program components into pieces that can be run simultaneously on multiple computer processors.
This enables programs to execute tasks like web indexing, natural language processing, or analyzing data in a fraction of their original runtime.
“There are so many people who use these types of programs, like data scientists, biologists, engineers, and economists. Now they can automatically accelerate their programs without fear that they will get incorrect results,” says Nikos Vasilakis, research scientist in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT.
The system also makes it easy for the programmers who develop tools that data scientists, biologists, engineers, and others use. They don’t need to make any special adjustments to their program commands to enable this automatic, error-free parallelization, adds Vasilakis, who chairs a committee of researchers from around the world who have been working on this system for nearly two years.
Vasilakis is senior author of the group’s latest research paper, which includes MIT co-author and CSAIL graduate student Tammam Mustafa and will be presented at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation. Co-authors include lead author Konstantinos Kallas, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania; Jan Bielak, a student at Warsaw Staszic High School; Dimitris Karnikis, a software engineer at Aarno Labs; Thurston H.Y. Dang, a former MIT postdoc who is now a software engineer at Google; and Michael Greenberg, assistant professor of computer science at the Stevens Institute of Technology.
A decades-old problem
This new system, known as PaSh, focuses on program, or scripts, that run in the Unix shell. A script is a sequence of commands that instructs a computer to perform a calculation. Correct and automatic parallelization of shell scripts is a thorny problem that researchers have grappled with for decades.
The Unix shell remains popular, in part, because it is the only programming environment that enables one script to be composed of functions written in multiple programming languages. Different programming languages are better suited for specific tasks or types of data; if a developer uses the right language, solving a problem can be much easier.
“People also enjoy developing in different programming languages, so composing all these components into a single program is something that happens very frequently,” Vasilakis … Read More...
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