The ability to process large numbers of continuous data streams in a near-real-time fashion has become a crucial prerequisite for many scientific and industrial use cases in recent years. While the individual data streams are usually trivial to process, their aggregated data volumes easily exceed the scalability of traditional stream processing systems. At the same time, massively-parallel data processing systems like MapReduce or Dryad currently enjoy a tremendous popularity for data-intensive applications and have proven to scale to large numbers of nodes. Many of these systems also provide streaming capabilities. However, unlike traditional stream processors, these systems have disregarded QoS requirements of prospective stream processing applications so far. In this paper we address this gap. First, we analyze common design principles of today's parallel data processing frameworks and identify those principles that provide degrees of freedom in trading off the QoS goals latency and throughput. Second, we propose a highly distributed scheme which allows these frameworks to detect violations of user-defined QoS constraints and optimize the job execution without manual interaction. As a proof of concept, we implemented our approach for our massively-parallel data processing framework Nephele and evaluated its effectiveness through a comparison with Hadoop Online. For an example streaming application from the multimedia domain running on a cluster of 200 nodes, our approach improves the processing latency by a factor of at least 13 while preserving high data throughput when needed.
Later systems such as Aurora* Medusa @cite_15 support distributed processing of data streams. An Aurora* system is a set of Aurora nodes that cooperate via an overlay network within the same administrative domain. In Aurora* the nodes can freely relocate load by decentralized, pairwise exchange of Aurora stream operators. Medusa integrates many participants such as several sites running Aurora* systems from different administrative domains into a single federated system. Borealis @cite_5 extends Aurora* Medusa and introduces, amongst other features, a refined QoS optimization model where the effects of load shedding on QoS can be computed at every point in the data flow. This enables the optimizer to find better strategies for load shedding.
@cite_5 @cite_15
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Borealis is a second-generation distributed stream processing engine that is being developed at Brandeis University, Brown University, and MIT. Borealis inherits core stream processing functionality from Aurora [14] and distribution functionality from Medusa [51]. Borealis modifies and extends both systems in non-trivial and critical ways to provide advanced capabilities that are commonly required by newly-emerging stream processing applications. In this paper, we outline the basic design and functionality of Borealis. Through sample real-world applications, we motivate the need for dynamically revising query results and modifying query specifications. We then describe how Borealis addresses these challenges through an innovative set of features, including revision records, time travel, and control lines. Finally, we present a highly flexible and scalable QoS-based optimization model that operates across server and sensor networks and a new fault-tolerance model with flexible consistency-availability trade-offs. Stream processing fits a large class of new applications for which conventional DBMSs fall short. Because many stream-oriented systems are inherently geographically distributed and because distribution offers scalable load management and higher availability, future stream processing systems will operate in a distributed fashion. They will run across the Internet on computers typically owned by multiple cooperating administrative domains. This paper describes the architectural challenges facing the design of large-scale distributed stream processing systems, and discusses novel approaches for addressing load management, high availability, and federated operation issues. We describe two stream processing systems, Aurora* and Medusa, which are being designed to explore complementary solutions to these challenges. This paper discusses the architectural issues facing the design of large-scale distributed stream processing systems. We begin in Section 2 with a brief description of our centralized stream processing system, Aurora [4]. We then discuss two complementary efforts to extend Aurora to a distributed environment: Aurora* and Medusa. Aurora* assumes an environment in which all nodes fall under a single administrative domain. Medusa provides the infrastructure to support federated operation of nodes across administrative boundaries. After describing the architectures of these two systems in Section 3, we consider three design challenges common to both: infrastructures and protocols supporting communication amongst nodes (Section 4), load sharing in response to variable network conditions (Section 5), and high availability in the presence of failures (Section 6). We also discuss high-level policy specifications employed by the two systems in Section 7. For all of these issues, we believe that the push-based nature of stream-based applications not only raises new challenges but also offers the possibility of new domain-specific solutions.