Active Streams and the effects of stream stream specialization

Fabian E. Bustamante, Greg Eisenhauer, Karsten Schwan, and Patrick Widener

College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332, USA
{fabianb, eisen, schwan}@cc.gatech.edu

Abstract

The explosive growth of the Internet, with the emergence of new networking technologies and the increasing number of network-capable end devices, is paving the way to a number of novel distributed applications and services. Cooperative distributed systems have become a common computing model and pervasive computing has caught the interest of academia and industry. The realization of these types of applications is complicated by the characteristics of their target environments, including their heterogeneous nature as well as the dynamically varying demands on and availability of their resources. Dynamic variations in resource usage are due to applications' data dependencies and/or users' dynamic behaviors, while the run-time variation in resource availability is a consequence of failures, resource additions or removals, and most importantly, contention for shared resources. This poster presents Active Streams, a middleware approach and its associated framework for building such novel distributed applications and services. It reports our initial results in understanding the effects of stream specialization through streamlets, demonstrating experimentally the potential improvements in latency (3-6X) and CPU utilization (up to 6X) derived from migrating streamlets `up' a stream, as well as the need for intermediate computational units.

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