PLSE Seminar — Nikos Vasilakis: Automated, Correct Parallelization of Shell Programs

Abstract: Shell scripting is used pervasively, partly due to its
simplicity in combining components (commands) written in any
programming language. Unfortunately, this language-agnostic
composition hinders automated parallelization and distribution, often
forcing developers to manually rewrite shell programs and their
third-party components in other languages that support these features.
In this talk, I will present a series of systems that, combined, offer
automated parallelization of Unix/Linux shell scripts—along with
serious correctness and compatibility guarantees.

Bio: Nikos Vasilakis is a Research Scientist at MIT CSAIL. His
research encompasses systems, programming languages, and security and
has been awarded by several best-paper, best-presentation, and
best-demo awards. His current focus is on automatically enhancing
software systems with new capabilities such as parallelism,
distribution, and security against a variety of threat models. Nikos
is also a Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Require Security,
a startup transitioning his software supply-chain research to
industry; and a member of the Technical Steering Committee behind
PaSh, a shell-script parallelization project hosted by the Linux
Foundation.

Paper URLs: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.09436.pdf, http://nikos.vasilak.is/p/pash-icfp.pdf, http://nikos.vasilak.is/p/pash-hotos.pdf