An order-aware dataflow model for parallel Unix pipelines

Abstract

We present a dataflow model for modelling parallel Unix shell pipelines. To accurately capture the semantics of complex Unix pipelines, the dataflow model is order-aware, i.e., the order in which a node in the dataflow graph consumes inputs from different edges plays a central role in the semantics of the computation and therefore in the resulting parallelization. We use this model to capture the semantics of transformations that exploit data parallelism available in Unix shell computations and prove their correctness. We additionally formalize the translations from the Unix shell to the dataflow model and from the dataflow model back to a parallel shell script. We implement our model and transformations as the compiler and optimization passes of a system parallelizing shell pipelines, and use it to evaluate the speedup achieved on 47 pipelines.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Aug 19, 2021
Source ID
10.1145/3473570

Entities

People

  • Konstantinos Kallas
  • Martin C. Rinard
  • Nikos Vasilakis
  • Shivam Handa

Organizations

  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • National Science Foundation
  • University of Pennsylvania

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.