Processing data streams with hard real-time constraints on heterogeneous systems

Abstract

Data stream processing applications such as stock exchange data analysis, VoIP streaming, and sensor data processing pose two conflicting challenges: short per-stream latency -- to satisfy the milliseconds-long, hard real-time constraints of each stream, and high throughput -- to enable efficient processing of as many streams as possible. High-throughput programmable accelerators such as modern GPUs hold high potential to speed up the computations. However, their use for hard real-time stream processing is complicated by slow communications with CPUs, variable throughput changing non-linearly with the input size, and weak consistency of their local memory with respect to CPU accesses. Furthermore, their coarse grain hardware scheduler renders them unsuitable for unbalanced multi-stream workloads.