Saturday, May 2, 2009


Packing for a one week (net) travel to the USA. We had recently been informed that the paper entitled: A stratified approach for supporting high throughput event processing application
has been accepted for presentation in the DEBS 2009 conference that will take place in early July in Nashville. The paper written by Yuri Rabinovich, Geetika Lakshmanan and myself describes results obtained last year in our scalability project, the project is still going on, and its results will be flowing to IBM products.

Here is the abstract of this paper:

The quantity of events that a single application needs to process is constantly increasing, RFID related events have been doubled within the past year and reached 4 trillion events per day,
financial applications in large banks are processing 400 million events per day, and Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games are monitoring in peaks 1 million events per second. It is evident that scalability in event throughput is a major requirement for these types of pplications. While the first generation of event processing systems has been centralized, we see various solutions that attempt to use both scale-up and scale-out techniques. Alas, partitioning of the processing manually is difficult due to the semantic dependencies among various event rocessing agents. It is also difficult to tune up the partition dynamically in a manual way. Manual partitioning is typically vertical, i.e. there is a single partition set with centralized routing. This paper proposes a horizontal partition that is automatically created by analyzing the semantic dependencies among agents using a stratification principle. Each stratum contains a collection of independent agents, and events are always routed to subsequent strata. We also implement a profiling-based technique for assigning agents to nodes in each stratum with the goal of aximizing throughput. A complementary step is to distribute the load among the different execution nodes dynamically based on performance characteristics of nodes and agents and the event traffic model. Experimental results show significant improvement in the ability to process high hroughput of events relative to both centralized solutions as well as vertical partitions. We find this to be a promising approach to achieve high scalability without requiring difficult manual tuning, especially when the traffic model and the topology of the event processing network is often changed.


More about event processing distribution and parallelization will be discussed in subsequent postings.

DEBS has also issued recently a call for fast abstracts, posters and demos, an opportunity to share with the community work that is in less mature phase. show interesting demos, and discuss ideas.

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