Programmable Software Systems for Correct High-performance Applications

We live in an era of unprecedented compute availability. The advent of the cloud allows anyone to deploy critical high-performance applications that serve millions of users without owning or managing any computational resources. The goal of my research is to enable the development of such high-performance applications with robust correctness guarantees. To achieve this goal, I build practical programmable software systems that target realistic workloads in widely-used environments. My systems are rooted in solid foundations, incorporating formal specifications and techniques drawn from the programming languages, compilers, and formal methods literature.In this talk I will present some of my work on such systems, including PaSh, the first optimization system for the Unix shell since its inception 50 years ago, as well as MuCache, a caching system for microservice graphs. Surprisingly, the shell and microservices have a key characteristic in common, they are both used to compose black-box components to create applications that are greater than the sum of their parts. I will conclude the talk by arguing that systems research is a key requirement to support the increased compute demands of new applications and enable future breakthroughs.