Parallelization of Time Consuming Linux Commands on Multicores

Abstract

Some Linux commands are identified as most time consuming commands in the operating system. These operations take much longer time to complete because they need to traverse trough whole directory structure and analyze. The idea is to introduce parallelization to the time consuming Linux commands. With the rapid improvements in multiprocessor architecture, modern CPU consists with multicore supports, for example Dual-Core, Quad-Core, Core i7 etc. When the system supports multicore architecture, time consuming commands should identify the systems capability and divide its sub processes among the other processes to make task complete. Three basic Linux commands, namely, ‘grep’ command from GNUs command set, ‘sort’ command in coreutils and find' command from GNUs find utilities were selected for parallelization. Excellent speedup improvements were observed for `grep’ and ‘sort’ while the parallelization of `find’ needs further investigation due to its inherent intricateness.